Brussels Drafts a Dark Patterns Law With a 6% Turnover Fine and a Ban on Ads Aimed at Children

The European Commission will present the Digital Fairness Act on Wednesday, and a draft seen by Reuters sets out a set of prohibitions that go further into product design than any EU consumer law has gone before.

The headline is the penalty ceiling. Companies found to have used unfair digital trade practices could be fined up to 6% of their annual global turnover, matching the maximum available under the Digital Services Act. Existing EU consumer rules, under the 2019 Omnibus Directive, require member states to make available fines of at least 4% of a trader's turnover in the countries concerned for widespread infringements. The shift is from a national percentage to a global one, and from a floor to a ceiling that regulators can actually reach.

What the draft prohibits

The core move is definitional. Business-to-consumer "dark patterns", meaning deceptive or manipulative interface designs on websites and apps that steer people into buying more, would be classified as unfair commercial practices and banned.

On top of that prohibition, the draft bans personalised advertising aimed at children or vulnerable consumers. Sellers using dynamic pricing, where a price such as an event ticket moves with real-time demand, would have to disclose how many items are available at the advertised price. And traders would have to let users switch off features that encourage compulsive or excessive use.

Those four items are a coherent package. Each describes a practice that is legal today in most member states, each is difficult to challenge under existing rules because the harm is diffuse, and each is a design decision rather than a contractual term. Consumer law was built to examine what a trader promised. This proposal examines how the shop was arranged.

The evidence base

The Commission's own review of consumer law found that 97% of the most popular websites and apps used by EU consumers deployed at least one dark pattern, according to a summary by the law firm CMS. That number is the political argument for the proposal: a practice used almost universally is either not understood by regulators or not covered by the rules.

CMS, which expected the proposal on 11 November, does not expect the act to take effect before the end of 2028 and lists subscription traps, influencer marketing and AI chatbots as likely topics in the wider file. Reuters' account of the draft does not mention them, which is a reminder that the version seen this week is the Commission's opening bid, not the final text.

The gap between the ambition and the instrument

The draft already has its first criticism, and it comes from the consumer side rather than from industry. Finance Watch, which campaigns on financial services rules, said the proposal does not do enough for people investing online.

"The proposals on dark patterns go in the right direction, but they lack ambition to sufficiently protect consumers in financial services," said Peter Norwood, the organisation's senior research and advocacy officer.

That is a precise objection. A ban on manipulative design applies to a trading app in the same way as to a shopping app, but the harm differs: a dark pattern that adds an unwanted item to a basket costs a few euros, while one that pushes a retail investor into a leveraged product can cost a household's savings. Financial services already sit under MiFID conduct rules, and the question the negotiation will have to answer is whether digital fairness adds anything there or merely restates an obligation that exists.

What happens next

Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath presents the proposal on Wednesday. It then goes to the European Parliament and to member states, a process that in this mandate has taken between eighteen months and two years for comparable digital files, and longer where the Council is divided.

Two things will decide the outcome. The first is the legal basis: a consumer protection instrument adopted under Article 114 or Article 169 carries different enforcement mechanics from the digital rulebook, and the 6% figure only means something if there is a regulator with the power to impose it across borders. The second is whether the ban on personalised advertising to children is written as an absolute prohibition or as a set of conditions, because the advertising industry will fight hardest on that clause and it is the one with the clearest public support.

Worth noting what is not in the draft as reported. There is no gatekeeper threshold, no designation process, no list of covered platforms. This law would apply to any trader selling to EU consumers, which is a much larger population of companies than the Digital Markets Act ever touched, and a much smaller population of law firms ready to defend them.