The era of digital tricks, hidden costs and interfaces designed to empty users’ wallets is numbered. There European Commissionled by the action of Michael McGrath and Henna Virkkunen, revealed the proposed Digital Fairness Act (DFA), a landmark regulatory package aimed at guarantee on the web the same protections guaranteed in the offline world.
The crackdown on manipulative techniques and price transparency
The community estimates are clear: the new provisions will avoid enormous financial losses, generating savings estimated at 13.7 billion euros per year for European citizens. The provision bans the so-called dark patternsthat is, those deceptive marketing tactics that drive compulsive buying exploiting false urgencies such as i messages about products that are almost out of stock or leveraging guilt when unsubscribing from a mailing list.
The transparency operation also fully affects the e-commerce and online ticketing sector, eliminating the practice of drip pricing which only reveals additional costs at checkout. From now on the prices will have to be complete from the start. The same attention is reserved for tickets for concerts and sporting events managed through dynamic pricing: digital platforms will have the absolute obligation to communicate the trend of costs and the expected maximum limit in real time. On the gaming front, virtual currencies and microtransactions such as loot boxes undergo strong restrictions to protect minors, who will be able to disable these mechanics by default.
User rights, record sanctions and crackdown on influencers
The new regulatory framework intervenes directly on digital contracts and customer assistance services, imposing simple and immediate cancellation procedures for subscriptions and eliminating insidious free trials that are automatically renewed without consent. An unprecedented protection is also recognized in the relationship with assistance: consumers will acquire the inalienable right to interface with a human operator if automated chatbots are ineffective.
Furthermore, the world of social media is being profoundly reformed thanks to stringent obligations for users influencerswhich they will have to unambiguously label sponsored content and stop any form of aggressive advertising profiling aimed at minors and vulnerable subjects.
To ensure the effective application of the rules, the package is combined with a review of cooperation between national authorities, giving the European Commission the direct power to initiate cross-border investigations and impose fines of up to 6% of annual turnover global to non-compliant companies. With an economic impact estimated at €88.4 billion in avoided losses over the next decade, the Digital Fairness Act stands to become the world’s most advanced legal pillar for restoring fairness in the digital economy.
