The European Commission published a draft of the Digital Fairness Act on Wednesday, a broad proposal aimed at curbing online practices that push consumers to spend more time and money than they intend. Gaming, social media, and e-commerce platforms would fall under the new rules, which target misleading pricing or availability claims, addictive design features such as gaming loot boxes, and undisclosed influencer marketing. The Commission said the act is meant to make the online experience fairer for consumers of all ages.
According to the Commission, the proposal would also benefit businesses by requiring fairer competition, and it estimates that EU consumers could save up to €13.7 billion, or roughly $15.1 billion, per year. The restrictions reach across much of the digital landscape, including the recommendation algorithms on YouTube, TikTok, and Meta platforms, AI chatbots, and apps such as DuoLingo that continually prompt users to keep interacting. Some gaming organizations have already criticized the draft, calling its limits on virtual currencies, loot boxes, and micro-transactions offered to minors unworkable, unjustified, and disproportionate.
Because the measure is only a draft, it must still move through approvals in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union before it can become law, and its provisions could be altered or dropped during that process. If it takes effect, the Commission says companies that violate the rules could face fines of up to six percent of their worldwide annual turnover.
EU Commissioner Michael McGrath said the consumer protection rules are intended to ensure businesses compete on the merits of their products and services rather than on their ability to exploit consumers or evade the rules. He said the aim is not to make doing business harder, but to make doing business unfairly harder, and he argued that 21st-century consumers cannot be protected by rules that have not kept pace with the 21st-century economy.
For US technology companies, the proposal matters because the platforms named in its scope, among them YouTube, TikTok, and Meta, serve American users and operate global businesses, and the turnover-based penalty framework would apply to worldwide revenue. The draft now heads into the EU legislative process, where its final shape remains undetermined.
The proposal follows years of expanding EU scrutiny of online platform practices, and the Commission positioned the act as an update to consumer protection rules for the modern economy.
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