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Digital Fairness Act: a real step forward for the protection of children, but gaps remain
5Rights Foundation welcomes the European Commission’s proposal for a Digital Fairness Act (DFA) as an important step towards ending the commercial exploitation of consumers, including children, online. But leaving education technology out of key protections, and an unclear interplay with the EU KIDS Act, risk weakening its promise.
Today, the European Commission published its long-awaited proposal for a Digital Fairness Act, which modernises EU consumer law for the digital age and introduces new rules on how digital products are designed and marketed. The proposal answers long-standing calls from children’s rights organisations and from the European Parliament, whose Resolution on the protection of minors online, adopted in November 2025, asked for strong obligations on video games, loot boxes and in-app currencies.
The Commission’s proposal turns the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive into a directly applicable Regulation and adds a new chapter on digital fairness. It also revises the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation to strengthen centralised enforcement at the European level.
Clear rules against manipulative design and marketing
The proposal sets a clear prohibition of dark patterns, banning online interfaces designed to deceive or manipulate consumers. It is backed by a list of practices considered unfair in all circumstances, which the Commission will be able to update as new techniques emerge. For instance, practices that create the impression that the consumer doesn’t have a choice, or persistently ask the consumer to repeat a choice, given a false impression of scarcity, will be prohibited.
It also introduces welcome new rules on influencer marketing. Commercial content will have to be clearly labelled as advertising, and influencers will no longer be able to directly encourage children to buy products or to pressure their parents into buying them, to hide the commercial nature of their content, or to present products as suitable for children when they are not.
5Rights also welcomes the prohibition of personalised advertising targeting children, which extends the ban already in place for online platforms under the Digital Services Act and for video sharing platforms under the Audiovisual Media Services Directive to all digital services and companies across the advertising chain.
A glaring gap: education technology
While services designed for educational purposes and used in schools are already excluded from the scope of the EU KIDS Act, the proposal fails to apply key protections to EdTech. Indeed, the DFA proposal’s rules on addictive design do not apply to digital products used in educational settings. As a result, children are left without protection from addictive features in the very products they are often required to use at school. 5Rights and the Digital Future for Children’s Centre recent research on EdTech demonstrates that features that encourage competition, pressure or excessive engagement are detrimental to students.
5Rights Foundation Executive Director Leanda Barrington-Leach said:
“EdTech is big business and many of the supposedly “educational” services sold to schools and parents are worse than useless, undermining rather than supporting learning. Allowing tech to be addictive because it purports to be “educational” makes no sense; it will only incentivise bad practice and accelerate the crisis that is already very evident in children’s learning. We need a higher bar for education technologies, not a lower one.”
A complex interplay with the EU KIDS Act
The Digital Fairness Act complements the EU KIDS Act by tackling design features that push children to spend money on online gaming. Virtual currencies will be switched off by default for children and can only be activated with parental consent. Loot boxes and other paid variable reward systems, as well as pay-to-win and pay-to-progress mechanisms, will be prohibited for children.
However, the interplay between the two regulations could result in a complex web of exemptions. Several of the child protections in the proposal do not apply to services already covered by the EU KIDS Act, the KIDS Act takes precedence in case of conflict, and enforcement is split between different authorities depending on the type of service.
Manon Letouche, Head of EU Affairs at 5Rights Foundation, said:
“The reasons why some protections are present in the EU KIDS Act and others are in the Digital Fairness Act are unclear. This complexity risks creating loopholes that industry could use to avoid compliance, whether by claiming to fall under the other law, choosing the weaker set of rules, or sitting in the gaps between the two. The laws must be made coherent and complementary.”
5Rights will pursue its analysis of the proposal to ensure that all its provisions are relevant and that it works coherently with existing regulation. We look forward to working with the co-legislators to close these gaps and to ensure that children are protected wherever they are online, including when they are connected for educational purposes.
