Gaming, social media, and e-commerce platforms are facing a fresh wave of sweeping European Union rules that aim to make “your online experience fairer.” The newly proposed Digital Fairness Act (DFA) published by the EU Commission on Wednesday is designed to tackle practices that exploit consumers into spending more of their time and money online, including misleading prices or availability, addictive design features like gaming loot boxes, undisclosed influencer marketing, and more.
“The Act will protect consumers of all ages shopping and browsing for goods or services online,” the EU Commission said in a news bulletin. “It will also mean fairer competition for businesses, which are expecting to save EU consumers up to €13.7 billion ($15.1 billion) a year.”
The scope of the restrictions being proposed is broad, and could have a significant impact on major parts of the online digital landscape, from the “rabbit hole” algorithms across YouTube, TikTok, and Meta platforms, to AI chatbots and apps like DuoLingo that relentlessly nudge users to keep interacting with them. Some gaming organizations have already slammed the DFA proposal, describing its restrictions around virtual currencies, loot boxes, and offering micro-transactions to minors as being “unworkable, unjustified and disproportionate.”
Given this is a draft proposal, the DFA will undergo various approvals through the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union before being passed into law, and its current measures could be changed or removed entirely as part of that process. When (or if) it does come into force, the EU Commission says companies who violate the regulations could see fines of up to six percent of their worldwide annual turnover.
“Our consumer protection rules will help ensure that businesses compete on the merits of their products and services – not on their ability to exploit consumers or evade the rules. We are not making it harder to do business. We are making it harder to do business unfairly,” EU Commissioner Michael McGrath said in remarks following the DFA draft publication. “We cannot have 21st-century consumers protected by rules that have not kept pace with the 21st-century economy.”