EU Proposes a Digital Fairness Act for Online Markets

The European Commission on 11 November 2026 adopted a proposal for a Digital Fairness Act, a directly applicable regulation that would replace Directive 2005/29/EC, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, and the 27 national laws that currently transpose it. The formal text is COM(2026) 1100 final, 2026/0356 (COD). A Commission topic page and a news item dated the same day set out the political case. This is a proposal. It still needs the approval of the European Parliament and the Council, and it is not law in force.

The Commission adopted the proposal jointly with a Simplification Directive, COM(2026) 1110, as part of a wider consumer package that also includes a revision of the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation. The Digital Fairness Act itself is a consumer-law instrument. It is not an AI Act, and it is not a rewrite of the Digital Services Act or the Digital Markets Act, even though some of its articles refer to those files and to a proposed EU KIDS Act.

In the news item, the Commission attributes the problem statement to its 2025 Consumer Conditions Scoreboard: “around 60% of us buy goods or services online, yet online shoppers are over 60% more likely to experience problems than those shopping offline.” The same item says businesses are “expecting to save EU consumers up to €13.7 billion a year.” That savings figure is a Commission expectation, not a measured result.

Article 40 of the proposal says the regulation would enter into force on the twentieth day after publication in the Official Journal and “shall apply from [12 months after the entry into force].” Those dates only start if the proposal is adopted and published. Until Parliament and the Council have agreed a text, no application date is running.

What the proposal would actually regulate

The Commission’s topic page lists the consumer problems the Act is meant to address: dark patterns and addictive design, practices that encourage overspending, unfair personalisation, influencer marketing, obscure or misleading pricing, and obstacles to managing contracts concluded online, including cancellation, automatic renewals, free trials that convert into paid subscriptions, and the inability to reach a human being in customer service. The legal text turns those headings into numbered articles.

Article 10 would prohibit traders from designing or operating online interfaces “in a manner that is likely to deceive or manipulate” consumers, and would treat a list of dark patterns in Part III of Annex I as unfair in all circumstances. The Commission would be able to amend that list by delegated act. Article 11 would set rules for influencer marketing, including salient disclosure of commercial communications, and would prohibit influencers from exploiting a minor’s trust.

Articles 12 and 13 deal with personalisation. Article 12 would prohibit targeting advertising based on profiling to minors, or using special categories of personal data when this could cause harm. Article 13 would prohibit personalised pricing based on profiling when this could cause harm to minors or vulnerable consumers. Articles 14 to 16 cover spending-maximising practices in digital products. Article 14 would require traders that offer paid-for virtual currencies to show the corresponding monetary value of virtual items, and would require those currencies to be disabled by default for minors, to be turned on only with parent or guardian approval. Article 15, headed “Variable reward systems,” is the proposal’s loot-box provision: traders would have to disclose the types of items available and the probability of obtaining them, offer an effective way to turn paid-for variable reward systems off, and would be prohibited from offering them to minors. Article 16 would prohibit pay-to-progress and pay-to-win mechanisms for minors.

Article 17, on addictive design, would require traders whose products are intended or can reasonably be foreseen to encourage compulsive or excessive use to offer tools to disable autoplay and uninterrupted consumption, unsolicited notifications, features that penalise users for not engaging regularly, and persistent prompts that simulate interpersonal relations. Article 19 would require a trader using a virtual queue to show the current price in real time and, where the price may vary, the maximum price the consumer may have to pay.

On contracts, Article 20 would require a clear reminder before a free trial ends, and would provide that the consumer is not bound by a paid contract unless they have expressly agreed after that reminder. Article 23 would require an online contract-termination function, labelled “terminate the contract here” or an unambiguous equivalent, wherever the trader offers consumers the chance to conclude contracts through an online interface. Article 25 would require that, where a trader provides online customer service after a contract is concluded, communication with a human being is made available upon request when other means are not effective, with an exception for investment services under MiFID.

Article 38 would repeal Directive 2005/29/EC. Because the instrument is a regulation, it would be “binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States,” replacing the current patchwork of 27 national transpositions of the Directive.

A consumer-law proposal, not a new AI file, and not yet in force

The important legal change is the form as much as the list of practices. A directive leaves each capital to write its own transposing law. A regulation would put one text into force across the Union, which is the Commission’s answer to the fragmentation the 2024 Digital Fairness Fitness Check flagged. That is also why this file should be read as consumer protection, not as an AI-specific rule. The proposal mentions AI companions and general conversational chatbots only where it carves out overlap with a proposed EU KIDS Act. The centre of gravity remains dark patterns, pricing, subscriptions and spending design.

It would sit alongside, rather than instead of, the Union’s existing digital rulebook. The Commission has already been using the Digital Services Act against large platforms, including a preliminary finding that TikTok’s For You feed breaches the DSA, a five-step DSA plan accepted from Temu after a €200 million illegal-goods finding, and a still-open DSA case into whether Booking.com does enough to stop scams. The Digital Markets Act is a different instrument again, about gatekeeper obligations; TikTok’s challenge to its DMA gatekeeper label is a reminder that those fights are already in court. The Digital Fairness Act would add a trader-facing consumer code that is not limited to designated platforms. If it is adopted, those regimes would have to be applied together, which is easier to announce than to police.

None of that happens until Parliament and the Council agree. The 11 November package is the opening of a legislative process, not the closing of one. The facts to watch are the usual ones for a Brussels proposal: whether the Annex I list of dark patterns is widened or narrowed, whether the variable-reward and virtual-currency rules survive lobbying from games and app stores, and whether the 12-month application period after entry into force is kept. Until a text is adopted and published, the Digital Fairness Act is a Commission proposal to replace the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive with a regulation, not a law that already binds traders or consumers.