The European Commission has put forward a Digital Fairness Act, a set of rules meant to stop apps, games and online shops from tricking people into spending money or staying subscribed. The proposal was adopted on 11 November 2026.
It goes after the things most app users have met at some point: free trials that quietly turn into paid plans, subscriptions that are easy to start and hard to cancel, automatic renewals nobody asked for, and customer service that never reaches a person. The same package covers misleading or constantly shifting prices and design tricks that push people to keep spending.
The Commission’s page on the act names several other targets: addictive design, unfair personalisation, influencer marketing and practices that pull in vulnerable consumers and children. For games, restrictions on pay-to-win mechanics and loot boxes aimed at minors were already in a leaked draft earlier this week.
The Digital Fairness Act is published together with a separate Simplification Directive, and the package also revises the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation, the rulebook for how national consumer authorities work together on cross-border cases. The aim is to strengthen enforcement as well as the rules themselves.
The Commission describes the goal as giving people in the EU the same level of protection online that they have offline. For app makers and game studios, that would mean design choices such as dark patterns, automatic renewals and unclear pricing would come under direct scrutiny, and subscription services would feel it most, since cancellation flows and trial conversions are named outright.
This is a proposal, not law. The rules would apply to consumers in the EU, and the Commission’s page gives no date for when any part would take effect.
