Consumer lawyers have spent a year arguing about what the Digital Fairness Act should cover. They now have four months to argue about what it actually says. Parliament’s legislative tracker still lists the file as announced, with an indicative date in the fourth quarter of 2026, which puts a draft on the table before Christmas or not at all this mandate.
The scope has been public for a while. The Commission’s 2026 work programme placed the initiative under the priority on protecting democracy and upholding values, and named four targets: manipulative interface design, addictive product design, unfair personalisation, and marketing by social media influencers. Parliament’s own file on the Digital Fairness Act adds a fifth strand that gets far less attention, namely a promise to strip back some existing information duties in certain contract types.
That last point matters more than it sounds. It signals that the Commission does not intend to bolt a new rulebook onto the old one and walk away. It intends to trade. Traders would accept harder rules on design and personalisation in exchange for lighter paperwork elsewhere. Whether the trade is worth taking depends entirely on where the drafters set the line between a persuasive interface and a manipulative one, and nobody outside the building has seen that line yet.
The evidence base is not new either. A 2024 fitness check of three consumer directives concluded that the core rules still work in principle but only partly deliver in practice. Consumers reported deceptive interfaces, subscriptions that renew easily and cancel badly, personalisation that targets a weakness rather than a preference, and contract terms accepted under pressure. The Commission’s own diagnosis blames thin enforcement, legal uncertainty, and twenty-seven national approaches drifting apart.
Consultation responses closed on 24 October 2025 and split along entirely predictable lines. Consumer organisations want binding prohibitions with named practices. Platforms want the existing framework left alone, with TikTok arguing that the case for further intervention is narrow. Neither position is surprising. What is notable is that the political groundwork was laid well before the consultation. Parliament passed a resolution on addictive design in December 2023, and the Council adopted conclusions on influencers in May 2024 that flagged the effect on minors.
Influencer marketing is the strand where a new law would bite fastest, because the current position is close to unmanageable. A creator in one member state posting to an audience in six others sits under national advertising codes that disagree on what counts as a disclosure, when a gifted product becomes a paid promotion, and whether the brand or the creator carries liability. Enforcement authorities chase individuals rather than the commercial chain behind them. A harmonised disclosure standard with platform-level accountability would change the economics of that chain in a way that national codes never have.
The harder question is overlap. The Digital Services Act already bans dark patterns on regulated platforms, and the unfair commercial practices regime already catches misleading omissions. A fresh instrument risks creating three routes to the same complaint and no clear answer on which regulator picks it up. The Commission has signalled it wants to fix that separately, through a revision of the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation, including the possibility of investigation powers held centrally rather than by national authorities alone.
That is the reform worth watching. Rules against manipulative design are only as strong as the body willing to bring a case against a company headquartered somewhere else. Non-EU traders selling into the single market remain the weakest link, and coordinated sweeps by national regulators have repeatedly produced findings without producing consequences. If the Digital Fairness Act arrives in December without a matching enforcement fix, it will read as a strong text and behave like a weak one.
Businesses have little to do before then except map exposure. Any firm running subscription flows, personalised pricing, gamified engagement loops, or paid creator partnerships in Europe should assume all four land in scope. The draft will not be law for years. The design decisions being locked in now will still be running when it is.
