Games, social media and e-commerce platforms are facing a new wave of sweeping rules from the European Union that aim to make “your online experience fairer.” The new Digital Fairness Act (DFA) proposal published by the EU Commission on Wednesday is designed to tackle practices that exploit consumers to spend more time and money online, including misleading pricing or availability, addictive design features like gaming loot boxes, undisclosed influencer marketing and more.
“The Law will protect consumers of all ages who buy and search for goods or services online,” the EU Commission said in a news bulletin. “It will also mean fairer competition for companies, which expect to save EU consumers up to €13.7 billion ($15.1 billion) a year.”
The scope of the proposed restrictions is broad and could have a significant impact on important parts of the online digital landscape, from the “rabbit hole” algorithms on the YouTube, TikTok and Meta platforms, to the artificial intelligence chatbots and apps like DuoLingo that relentlessly push users to continue interacting with them. Some gaming organizations have already criticized DFA’s proposal, describing its restrictions around virtual currencies, loot boxes and offering microtransactions to minors as “unworkable, unjustified and disproportionate.”
As this is a draft proposal, the DFA will go through several approvals through the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union before becoming law, and its current measures could be changed or removed entirely as part of that process. When (or if) it comes into force, the EU Commission says companies that violate the regulations could be fined up to six percent of their global annual turnover.
“Our consumer protection rules will help ensure that companies compete on the merits of their products and services, not on their ability to exploit consumers or evade 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 publication of the draft DFA. “We cannot have 21st century consumers protected by rules that have not kept pace with the 21st century economy.”
