Executive Summary

Key figures

Four of them. The first two say what the bill puts at stake and what it leaves alone; the second two say why it is being written now and where it still has a hole.

Sources: European Commission, Digital Fairness Act · euronews · Greens/EFA statement

The announcement came in Brussels on November 11. Michael McGrath, the commissioner for democracy, stood with Henna Virkkunen, the executive vice-president for tech sovereignty. Three pieces arrived together under the name of a consumer package: the Digital Fairness Act, the revision of the Consumer Protection Cooperation regulation, and a simplification directive amending the Consumer Rights Directive and the ePrivacy Directive. "The Single Market lives through its 450 million consumers," Virkkunen said. "Our laws must keep up with the way people live, shop and do business today."

The numbers the Commission leaned on come from the 2025 Consumer Conditions Scoreboard. About 60% of consumers in the European Union buy goods or services online, and online buyers are more than 60% likelier than offline buyers to run into a problem. The impact assessment puts the detriment the package would spare consumers, counting money and time together, at 13.7 billion euros a year, against 1.2 billion euros a year in additional cost to traders.

The off-switch requirement is Article 17, and it names four groups of feature. Automatic play of content and uninterrupted consumption without regular moments of pause form one group. The others are notifications not triggered by the consumer's own activity on the service, features that reward engaging at regular times by penalizing anyone who skips, and features and system behaviors that keep use going by simulating interpersonal relations. The article asks for tools that disable them "individually or all at once." What the four have in common is that the next thing arrives whether or not the user decides anything. The table below opens the four groups into five rows and uses the right column for what the feature does unprompted.

▲ The four groups that Article 17 of the draft Digital Fairness Act requires traders to let adult users switch off, opened into five rows. Autoplay and uninterrupted content sit in one group in the text itself. Sources: Commission bill text, COM(2026) 1100 · euronews

The same bill carries prohibitions and duties as well. Some conduct it blocks outright, and some conduct it compels.

• • Dark patterns that manufacture urgency are prohibited. Virkkunen offered fake scarcity, a claim that "only five items remain," as the example. Article 10 bars interface design likely to deceive or manipulate consumers, then sets out the most dangerous tricks in an annex as unfair in all circumstances. Visually inflating the option that suits the trader, delivering an outcome other than the one the button promised, and dressing a notification up as a message from a person are among them. Anything on that list is a breach without proof of harm in the individual case, and the Commission can extend the list by delegated act.
• • Leaving a subscription has to be as easy as joining one. Automatic renewal requires a conscious choice by the consumer, a free trial has to be flagged before it turns paid, and traders owe an online route out of the contract.
• • The ban on profiling ads aimed at minors widens to every service. Today the Digital Services Act imposes it only on the largest platforms. The bill extends it to every website and app and blocks targeting built on special categories of personal data alongside it.
• • In-game spending and virtual currency pick up transparency duties. Article 16 prohibits pay-to-win and pay-to-progress mechanics for minors, and games have to show what a virtual currency costs in real money. Dynamic pricing gains a disclosure duty without being restricted.
• • Influencers have to label commercial collaboration. Urging minors directly to buy, or to talk an adult into buying, is prohibited too.

The dark pattern prohibition and the addictive design article live in one bill at two strengths. A fake scarcity message is a breach the moment it ships, because anything in the annex counts as unfair without an inquiry into its effect. Autoplay is not a breach in itself; withholding a way to turn it off is. Article 17 asks for an easily accessible and effective tool, not for the feature to go away. Where the two come apart in practice is a single settings screen. The trader may ship with the feature running, and seeing it stopped takes a user who goes looking for the setting.

Kim van Sparrentak, the Greens/EFA member of the European Parliament who has carried this file, issued a statement the day of the announcement. It opens by calling the decision a historic mistake for both health and democracy. The sentence that follows reads: "The Commission has caved and is now legitimising Big Tech's addictive business models by putting in a law that addictive design is automatically on." Then: "Fair and safe online services should be the default. Instead, the Commission is actually making addictive services the standard."

The same statement names three places it finds empty. The first is recommender algorithms. Big Tech's dangerous algorithms, it says, "are even fully exempted from the law," because what can be switched off stops at the features on screen and leaves alone the part that decides what appears first. The second is loot boxes in games, which some member states proposed banning and which are not excluded by default. The third is the dynamic pricing used on rail tickets and event seats, which collects a disclosure duty and no substantive restriction. The group also rejected the view that protection belongs to minors and vulnerable consumers alone, on the ground that manipulative design reaches every consumer rather than only children or anyone formally classed as vulnerable.

Van Sparrentak welcomed other parts of the package: disclosure rules for influencer marketing, the right to reach a human being in customer service, unsubscribe protections, and consumer safeguards around AI agents that conclude contracts. The criticism aims at one article.

It is not only the Greens. Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal of the digital rights network EDRi asked why a Commission that recognizes addictive design this plainly declined to impose a stronger duty against it. Letting people switch a feature off, she argued, cannot be treated as enough on its own, and as drafted "that leaves significant uncertainty and potentially lengthy case-by-case assessments." Since the duty reaches only traders whose design is intended or can reasonably be foreseen to encourage compulsive use, who makes that call and on what evidence is the first thing that will be fought over. The same organization still called binding rules against manipulative design a significant step.

The most quoted number out of the announcement is 6% of worldwide annual turnover. It is not in the body of the Digital Fairness Act. It is in the revision of the Consumer Protection Cooperation regulation issued the same day. That regulation is the existing law setting out how national consumer authorities handle breaches that cross borders, and the revision hands the Commission direct investigative powers, speeds up cooperation between authorities, and obliges firms based outside the European Union to appoint a legal representative inside it. That is why the two came out as one package: one says what is prohibited, the other says who enforces it and how. Nor is 6% a new ceiling. The Digital Services Act caps at 6% and the Digital Markets Act at 10%.

The change in legal form is itself bound up with enforcement. The Digital Fairness Act repeals the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive of 2005 and absorbs its content into a regulation. A directive takes effect only once each member state transposes it into national law; a regulation applies across all 27 as written. That is why the Commission has until now been limited to coordinating national authorities on breaches that span several countries, and converting the directive into a regulation is the legal precondition for giving the Commission investigative and enforcement powers of its own.

How large those powers should be divided opinion inside the Commission. McGrath argued for stronger direct enforcement; Virkkunen warned that overlapping obligations could make the European Union rulebook harder to apply. The published text lands somewhere between them.

The timing deserves to be stated plainly. What appeared on November 11 is a proposal, filed as COM(2026) 1100. It has to pass through the ordinary legislative procedure, decided jointly by the European Parliament and the Council of member states, the text can change along the way, and no end date is fixed. Nor would it bite immediately on passage. The final provisions set application at 12 months after entry into force. The road to here was not short either. The European Parliament adopted a resolution carrying a right not to be disturbed in December 2023, the Commission published its digital fairness fitness check in October 2024, and the text arrived a year and a half after the May 2025 announcement that new legislation was coming.

Talking machines show up twice in the draft, and the two passages point at different things. One is the last group on the addictive design list. The text never says chatbot. It says "features and system behaviours that encourage continued use by simulating interpersonal relations," and gives as its example "persistent prompts to continue engaging with an automated system." The recital places AI companions and general conversational chatbots beside autoplay on video platforms and the pressure games apply to log in daily, as services where such features turn up. Korean coverage rendered the passage as imitating the closeness of a friend or a partner.

The other is about customer service. Article 25 secures the consumer's right to reach a human being on request and stops a trader from closing out the exchange with a bot alone. This one is less a matter of on and off than a route the trader has to keep open. If the earlier provision aims at design that stretches a conversation, this one aims at a structure in which the conversation has no exit.

Supervision splits in two as well. Enforcement of the off-switch article leaves the consumer authorities. For online platforms it goes to the authorities designated under the Digital Services Act, and for traders that provide or deploy AI systems it goes to the authorities designated under the AI Act. Whoever comes to check that a chatbot has an off switch will be an AI Act regulator.

The companies named as targets are Meta and Google, ByteDance for TikTok, and e-commerce operators such as Temu and Shein, all of them firms the European Union has already sanctioned more than once over dark patterns and algorithmic recommendation. Bloomberg carried the contents of the draft on November 9, two days ahead, and euronews and iapp.org among others confirmed the same facts after the official announcement on the 11th.

When regulation touches a design, the record that design leaves changes character with it. Session length, return interval and turns per conversation are numbers an organization starts collecting as a sign that a product is worth using. The same numbers are also a sign that holding on worked. One line of a log cannot tell the two apart. Whether a user who stayed thirty minutes wanted to stay or stayed because the next video started on its own is not written in the dwell time column.

This blog has written separately about optimizing a proxy metric until it drifts away from the real goal and about which to believe when stated preference and behavioral logs disagree. The bill puts the two in one place. Dwell time is a proxy, and the reason it grew is something the user never said.

The complaint that an off switch cannot move a default is right about the design, but the switch adds one thing to the record. Once the switch exists, the people who use it separate from the people who do not, and that split lands in the log. Until now there was no material for asking whether longer dwell time was value or capture; once a group that turned the feature off has a dwell time of its own, there is something to compare against. How clean that comparison will be is doubtful, if the path of the cookie consent banner is any guide. A screen that asks for a choice becomes a screen that steers one, and then the group that turned the feature off is biased in itself.

So an organization that accumulates engagement metrics has three things to check before the text is final.

• • Which of our metrics are an artifact of the design. Start with whether anyone has measured how the numbers move when autoplay or notifications are switched off. If nobody has, the metric as it stands mixes the value of the product with the force of the design.
• • Whether the act of switching off is recorded. Comparison needs the moment a user turned a feature off and the usage pattern on either side of it sitting in the same place. If a settings change is written nowhere, the button the law asks for will produce no material to analyze.
• • What stands in for satisfaction in a conversational product. A chat that runs long can mean the answer helped or that it never came. Turn count and session length alone cannot separate those. Signals from outside the session, how the conversation ended and whether the same question returns days later, are what separate them.

There is little reason to expect the list to stop where it is. Article 17(2) leaves room for the Commission to extend the set of features that must be switchable through later delegated acts. Metrics are being designed without knowing which feature joins next, so keeping a per-feature record of what the numbers look like with the feature off is work that pays for itself later.

One article keeps the recording question from staying an internal matter. Article 34 provides that where facts are presented supporting the likelihood of an unfair commercial practice online, courts and authorities may require a trader to disclose, in an easily accessible and understandable manner, evidence relating to "the design, operation and impact on the behaviour of consumers" of the practice. Supplying incorrect or incomplete material draws penalties, and a failure to disclose can itself be weighed in deciding whether a practice was unfair. Trade secrets get separate consideration, but the structure exposes, in the middle of a dispute, whether a firm routinely holds material explaining what its own product did to user behavior.

Seen from where AI-Ready Data is handled, the bill reads as a question about data quality. Good data is not clean data; it is data whose meaning is known. A log that accumulates without anyone knowing what the dwell time resulted from already fails that standard. Regulation does not change the fact. What it changes is that, once a penalty attaches, not knowing becomes a cost.

Official documents

• 1.European Commission. (2026, November 11). Digital Fairness Act.
• 2.European Commission. (2026, November 11). Making your online experience fairer [Press release].
• 3.European Commission. (2026, November 11). Bill text, COM(2026) 1100 final.

Analysis & criticism

• 4.Greens/EFA. (2026, November 11). Digital Fairness Act falls short on addictive design.
• 5.EUobserver. (2026). Digital Fairness Act: EU cracks down on stealth influencer ads and manipulative app design.

Press coverage

• 6.euronews. (2026, November 11). EU targets subscription traps, addictive design and hidden fees with new digital rules.
• 7.Bloomberg. (2026, November 9). EU Plans Crackdown on Addictive Social Media and AI Bot Features.