Digital Fairness Act: European Commission launches consultation and call for evidence

On 17 July 2025, the European Commission launched a long-awaited public consultation and call for evidence to inform its upcoming proposal for a new EU Digital Fairness Act. 

The legislative initiative contributes to the growing regulatory focus on e-commerce and other online practices where “consumer vulnerabilities are exploited for commercial purposes” – a trend recently seen across many jurisdictions, including the UK. 

Through its consultation, the Commission is seeking input from stakeholders on how to ensure fairness in business-to-consumer transactions in the digital single market, improve legal certainty, ensure effective enforcement and prevent market fragmentation in this space.

Background

In November 2024, the Commission published a report on its Digital Fairness ‘Fitness Check’, where it evaluated three key EU directives that form the backbone of the EU consumer protection framework that most traders must comply with: the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, the Consumer Rights Directive, and the Unfair Contract Terms Directive.[1]

The Commission found that the three Directives remain both relevant and necessary to ensure a high level of consumer protection, regulatory clarity and consumer confidence in e-commerce and in the EU digital markets. However, the Commission also identified significant gaps in the current legal framework, pointing to the need “for rules that are better adapted to the specific harmful practices and challenges that consumers face online”.

The upcoming proposal for a Digital Fairness Act aims to close these gaps and ensure that EU consumer protection rules remain effective and future-proof. The initiative is also intended to complement existing EU legislation including the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act and the AI Act (as to which see our other content on The Lens). 

The proposal is expected to be a key pillar of the Commission’s broader Consumer Agenda for 2025–2030, which aims to strengthen EU consumer protection in line with the EU’s digital transformation and sustainability goals.

Key areas of focus

The consultation outlines several areas where the Commission is looking to assess the need for “targeted prohibitions”:

• Dark patterns: online interface designs that mislead or pressure consumers into making decisions they would not otherwise take, such as false urgency claims. 
• Addictive design: features of online platforms that may encourage excessive use or spending, such as infinite scrolling, autoplay and content that disappears quickly. 
• Features in certain digital products such as video games, particularly when targeted at minors: features such as loot boxes, pay-to-win mechanics, and the use of virtual currencies, which may obscure real-world costs and mimic gambling behaviours.
• Personalisation practices: such as “problematic” profiling techniques that “exploit consumer vulnerabilities” for targeted advertising or pricing.
• Harmful practices by social media influencers: including the lack of transparency around commercial communications, the promotion of harmful products to social media followers and clarifying the responsibilities of companies that collaborate with influencers. 
• Unfair marketing related to pricing: pricing strategies that obscure the true cost of goods or services such as drip pricing and certain forms of dynamic pricing.
• Digital contracts: issues such as difficult cancellations of subscriptions, auto-renewals or free trials converted into paid subscriptions and the use of chatbots for customer service. 

The call for evidence also makes clear that the Commission sees the Digital Fairness Act as an “opportunity for streamlining and simplification” for businesses. This is consistent with previous statements from Commissioner Michael McGrath (Commissioner for Democracy, Justice and the Rule of Law), who has previously stressed the importance of avoiding regulatory duplication and fragmentation.

Enforcement reforms on the horizon? 

In late 2024, there were some suggestions that the Commission’s proposals would also seek to improve certain deficiencies in the current framework for the enforcement of EU consumer protection laws more generally. In its Digital Fairness Fitness Check, the Commission found that that the effectiveness of EU consumer protection laws is compromised by several factors including inadequate enforcement (currently largely decentralised and enforced at the national level), legal ambiguity, a lack of incentives for businesses to achieve the highest standards of protection, and the growing risk of regulatory fragmentation among Member States.

Although the consultation materials suggest that considerations related to enforcement will also feed into the proposals, it appears that the Commission currently intends to tackle general enforcement-related issues as part of its separate work on consumer law enforcement reforms – specifically its review of the EU Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation’s[2] decentralised approach to enforcement. In April 2025, Commissioner McGrath signalled that the Commission was considering a review that may see it obtain centralised consumer protection investigative and enforcement powers.

Next steps 

The consultation is open until 9 October 2025. The feedback from the call for evidence will contribute to the Commission’s impact assessment and inform the legislative proposal which is now expected in Q3 2026. 

While the legal shape of the Digital Fairness Act remains to be seen, the direction of travel is clear. Businesses operating in the digital space, particularly those with e-commerce operations, should take note of the Commission’s evolving priorities and areas of interest. As with the UK’s recent reforms under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the EU’s proposals reflect a broader regulatory trend towards greater scrutiny of digital business-to-consumer interactions. Consumer-facing businesses operating in the EU and in the UK should therefore watch out for any emerging regulatory divergence in this area. 

[1] Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC; Consumer Rights Directive 2011/83/EU; and Unfair Contract Terms Directive 93/13/EEC.

[2] EU Regulation 2017/2394.