Brussels: The European Commission has pushed its digital fairness proposal to the fourth quarter of 2026, leaving the consumer law meant to outlaw manipulative online design without a text almost ten months after its public consultation closed on 24 October 2025. Consumer groups say the delay hands another year to the interface tricks the initiative was written to stop.

The evidence behind the file is unusually blunt. A Commission behavioural study found that 97 percent of the most popular websites and apps used by consumers in the European Union deployed at least one dark pattern. Hidden fees, countdown clocks that never expire and cancellation journeys engineered to fail all sit inside that figure.

Commissioner Michael McGrath told an audience in Washington in March that the proposal had slipped to mid-2026 after what he described as extensive consultation and a full impact analysis. The Commission has since moved the date again, and the European Parliament legislative train now records the initiative as expected in the final quarter of the year.

Officials describe the wait as the cost of getting the scope right. The digital fairness file cuts across four areas that industry lobbies and consumer organisations read very differently:

• manipulative interface design, commonly called dark patterns
• influencer marketing and undisclosed commercial content
• addictive design features, with particular attention to minors
• personalisation that targets identified consumer vulnerabilities

The consultation exposed that split cleanly. In its own summary of the responses, the Commission recorded that stakeholders disagreed on whether Brussels needs to legislate again at all.

Respondents disagreed on the necessity to further regulate at EU level digital fairness.

Business representatives argued that guidance under existing consumer law would close the gaps faster than a new regulation. Consumer organisations rejected that reading and pressed for binding rules, telling the Commission that enforcement of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive has not kept pace with how platforms actually design their checkout flows.

The Commission has to answer a harder question than either camp concedes. The Digital Services Act already bans dark patterns on online platforms, and the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive already catches misleading omissions. A digital fairness instrument that duplicates both would add compliance cost without adding protection, which is why officials have spent the summer mapping the overlap rather than drafting articles.

Retailers and app developers face a practical timing problem in the meantime. National enforcers in France, the Netherlands and Italy have opened their own cases against subscription traps and personalised pricing, using the tools they already hold. Companies preparing for a single European standard are instead adjusting to divergent national practice, which is the outcome this initiative was supposed to prevent.

The background explains the slippage. The Commission announced the initiative in its work programme after a fitness check of EU consumer law concluded that the rulebook, written for a pre-platform market, no longer describes how consumers are steered online. The implementation dialogue McGrath convened in July 2025 tested appetite for a new act before drafting began, and it produced a fault line the Commission has not yet resolved.

Whatever text emerges will land late in the mandate, with the European Parliament and Council then needing at least two years to agree a position. On the current schedule, a rule aimed at practices documented in 2022 would not bind a single trader before 2029.