Malmö: A shopper in this Swedish city who tries to cancel a streaming subscription clicks through four screens, declines three retention offers and finally finds a grey link at the bottom of a page. Nothing about that experience breaks European law today. The Commission intends to change that.
The Digital Fairness Act arrives as a legislative proposal in the third quarter of 2026, which means the text lands within weeks. It represents the first attempt to write rules specifically for interface design rather than for the commercial claims a trader makes.
Consumer authorities have spent years stretching older instruments to cover the problem. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive dates from 2005 and speaks the language of misleading advertising. The Digital Services Act bans dark patterns, but only on the platforms it covers and only in general terms. Neither instrument tells a designer what a cancellation flow may look like.
Four practices dominate the Commission’s stated agenda. Manipulative interface design tops the list, covering confirmshaming, false urgency counters, pre-ticked boxes and the asymmetry between a one-click subscribe and a fifteen-click cancel. Influencer marketing follows, where paid promotion frequently reaches audiences that cannot identify it as advertising.
Addictive design forms the third strand, and it worries legislators most. Infinite scroll, streak mechanics, variable-reward notification schedules and autoplay all optimise for time spent rather than for anything the user chose. Regulating those features means regulating engineering decisions, which no European consumer instrument has previously attempted.
Unfair personalisation completes the set. Traders who infer that a shopper faces financial stress, or that a particular user responds to scarcity cues, can price and present accordingly. The Commission wants limits on exploiting inferred vulnerability, with tighter limits where the user is a minor. Parliament tracks the file on its legislative train.
Industry pushes back on duplication rather than on principle. Retailers point out that a single checkout page can already attract scrutiny under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, the Digital Services Act, the General Data Protection Regulation and national consumer codes. Adding a fifth layer, they argue, multiplies compliance cost without giving designers a clearer answer about what they may build.
Consumer organisations reply that four overlapping instruments have produced almost no enforcement against dark patterns, and that a rule nobody applies protects nobody. They want a blacklist of prohibited design practices, on the model of Annex I of the 2005 directive, so that enforcement does not depend on proving consumer detriment case by case.
The enforcement question may matter more than the drafting. National consumer authorities operate on modest budgets and rarely employ interface designers. A rule that requires case-by-case assessment of whether a button placement manipulates will sit unused unless the Commission funds the capacity to test it.
Timing works against a quick result. A proposal published this quarter enters Parliament and Council in an institutional cycle already crowded with digital files. Two years of negotiation followed by a transition period puts practical application somewhere near 2029.
The shopper in this city cancelling that subscription will click through those four screens for a while yet.
