College read-out / Press conference by European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna VIRKKUNEN and Commissioner Michael McGRATH on the Digital Fairness Act and a Consumer enforcement initiative
11 November 2026
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European Commission
Follow its sittings00:08 - 00:23
Speaker 2
Good morning everyone. Today is Tuesday 11th of November, and we're here with Executive Vice-President Virkkunen and Commissioner McGrath on today's College read-out. Executive Vice-President.
00:23 - 03:00
Speaker 10
Thank you very much, and good morning, everybody, and welcome to today's College read-out. Today we present a consumer package here together with Commissioner McGrath, and this package has two proposals: so, the Digital Fairness Act, to simplify and modernise consumer protection for the digital age, and the revision of Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation, to make enforcement of EU consumer law more effective and more coherent. We know that, in the recent years, the European Union has set a global standard for safe, secure, and fair online world for citizens and for our businesses alike. And we are delivering to that standard through the enforcement of the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the AI Act. And more recently, we have also proposed EU Kids Act to ensure safety from the very beginning to our children.
And, once more, Europe is showing leadership in protecting our users in the digital world. So now it was the time also to update consumer protection rules to ensure they remain a strong safety net in the digital world. We are tackling the new, unfair commercial practices here that distort consumers' choices and put pressure on them, undermining their ability to make informed choices. A very clear example of that is manipulative design practices, so-called dark patterns. When shopping online, we have all experienced fake urgency tactics, such as claims that only five items remain.
So, we are also here empowering now our consumers by giving them further control over addictive digital features, such as endless scrolling, or by making subscriptions and digital contracts easier to understand and easier also to cancel. And we are making influencer marketing and personalised commercial practices more transparent. This is good for consumers and it's also good for our businesses because it creates a level playing field across the European Union, just like we aim to do in the other areas of our legislation as well. And, in addition, the Commission is proposing also to revise the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation here. We are giving the Commission direct investigation and sanctioning powers in very large-scale cases with the major impact of consumers across the single market.
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