Digital Fairness Act and platform regulation creep

Online platforms in the EU are regulated by numerous laws, including the Digital Services Act (DSA). In a recent Report on the DSA, the European Commission (the Commission) wrote its findings “underscore the increasing complexity of the European regulatory landscape”.

As the Commission moves forward with plans for a potential Digital Fairness Act (DFA, see the initiative's public consultation and its factual summary report), it may increase this complexity further for entities already (and recently) regulated. In this part of our mini series we focus on the DFA’s potential impact on online platforms.

The DFA proposal – expected in the last quarter of 2026 – may seek to extensively regulate platform design. This could mean that certain features and functions that users value and that also help platforms stand out from competitors, could be banned altogether.

The DFA risks adding new layers to an already densely regulated digital landscape, leading to overlap and friction with existing and recent regulations such as the DSA, DMA, AI Act and others. This may significantly complicate the design of social media interfaces and negatively affect user experience. As many of these cornerstone digital acts are very new and enforcement is still rolling out, their impact cannot yet be fully assessed. Therefore, pressing ahead with the DFA risks that the existing framework gets no fair opportunity to demonstrate its effectiveness through ongoing enforcement proceedings and efforts to develop compliant solutions.

Regulating interface designs

The Commission is exploring options to further regulate digital interface design. The primary goal is to combat misleading designs across consumers’ choices online and to enhance transparency.

In this context, the Commission is also contemplating whether specific design features should be fully prohibited by the DFA. Alternatively, it is discussed whether the DFA could introduce its own set of rules governing digital product design choices. This set of rules could entail obligations to use specific formats for the provision of information as well as pre-determined designs for interfaces requiring consumer choices. Instead of existing principle-based rules, the DFA could introduce more specific provisions addressing certain design features more precisely.

Combatting misleading designs is a reasonable goal. However such provisions would add another layer of regulation to the already existing, dense and complex legal framework. Given that so-called “dark patterns” are already addressed in no less than twelve legal acts on the EU level, including the fallback provision introduced with Art. 25 DSA, further new regulation would not only complicate the design of interfaces but also lead to uncertainties regarding the applicable law and potentially contradictory results.

Furthermore, provisions banning a list of specific design features used today may be too specific to be future-proof and protective against emerging practices. Ultimately, provisions mandating specific designs risk constricting innovation in digital services, which happens largely through rapid experimentation in design. Prescriptive design rules freeze this process, redirectengineering resources into compliance, and tend to standardise experiences. This lowers differentiation across providers, reducing consumer choice.

Regulating user experience

Another focus area is onplatform functionalities and features. The Digital Fairness Act public consultation provides a list of such features, and asks respondents to consider an outright ban thereof. This list includes a fundamental defining feature of the modern internet and digital services: personalisation. Restricting platforms' ability to offer consumers a customised service without considering the usability may instead lead to fatigue and confusion, not empowerment of consumers.

Specifically, the Commission is also contemplating further restrictions on personalised advertising. Again, personalised advertising is already comprehensively regulated by several EU instruments including GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, DSA, DMA, Digital Content Directive, and Regulation (EU) 2024/900 on the transparency and targeting of political advertising. Besides the risks of legal uncertainty and overlaps, there is also a major economic aspect to further regulation: Many online platforms use the ‘ad-tech’ business model, whereby they offer their services and products free of charge in exchange for digital advertising revenue. While consumers benefit from products and services being free of charge for them, the rapidly growing digital ad industry is an important factor to the overall EU economic growth. 

Ultimately, blanket bans and prohibitions of an arbitrary list of product features reduce consumers’ choice. It is common practice across online platforms to allow for further individualisation of an experience, impacting platform functioning and features in accordance to one's subjective preferences. These include tools both at device and app level to support healthy usage habits of digital services and products, especially for users who wish to manage screen time or spending. These include screen time reminders, notification controls, autoplay toggles, and read receipts settings. Such solutions allow for a rich range of experiences online and allow consumers to set boundaries for and modulate these experiences based on the product or service, the trader providing it, or even based on their current mindset.

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