Digital Fairness Act: Why we need an ambitious DFA to protect digital consumers from manipulative and addictive design practices
By John Albert, Marijn Sax, and Natali Helberger
The fitness check on EU consumer law clearly shows there is more work to be done to tackle manipulative and addictive design patterns which can systematically undermine users’ autonomy and well-being. These patterns predictably stem from the incentives of engagement-driven business models and are further enabled by the structural asymmetries of power and information that characterise digital markets.
In this policy brief, we advocate for an ambitious Digital Fairness Act that futureproofs EU consumer law and protects consumers from the full range of unfair digital commercial practices across digital services, including deceptive interfaces, manipulative design, and addictive features. Our brief builds on proposals developed in Towards Digital Fairness (detailed in this report and this report).
An ambitious Digital Fairness Act should:
1. Ban hostile and unfair design that structurally subjects users to the commercial interests of service providers at the expense of their autonomy — addressing the root cause rather than isolated symptoms.
2. Widen the UCPD’s scope by updating the definition of ‘commercial practices’ to include ‘digital commercial practices’, to capture all influences, designs, and interactions consumers encounter online.
3. Update the UCPD’s General Clause by replacing ‘professional diligence’ with ‘digital professional diligence’, making explicit that exploiting digital asymmetry or digital vulnerability is a breach of that standard.
4. Expand the UCPD blacklist to explicitly prohibit manipulative, deceptive, and addictive design practices, establishing horizontal protections for all users, regardless of age.
5. Reverse the burden of proof, requiring traders to demonstrate that their design practices do not exploit digital asymmetry or vulnerability, rather than placing that burden on consumers.
6. Clarify the relationship between the DSA and UCPD, resolving current ambiguities about scope and precedence so that the two regimes operate as a coherent whole and consumers have concrete, actionable rights across both frameworks.
Read the full brief here:
