Towards digital fairness

Abstract

The EU Digital Policy Legislation, which is given form in several new legislative initiatives under the von der Leyen Commission, is by and large based on the premise that the existing consumer law acquis suffices to cover potential risks to health and safety as well as to the economic interests of consumers. Over the past years, European institutions have worked intensively on a new EU Digital Policy Framework that must address new regulatory challenges from digitisation, changing market dynamics and the role of powerful technology providers. The Digital Services Act Digital Markets Act gence Act (DMA), the proposed Artificial Intelligence (AIA), the proposed Data Act Platform Workers Directive and other ground-breaking regulations must address these challenges and create the conditions for effective oversight, public accountability and the protection and realisation of shared values and fundamental rights. In this new framework, consumers' interests are also addressed, albeit in a somewhat erratic and little systematic way. The underlying premise of the new EU Digital Policy Framework seems to be that the existing consumer law acquis (including, for example, the Unfair Commercial Practice Directive (UCPD), the Consumer Rights Directive Unfair Consumer Terms Directive) is by and large still sufficient to protect the legitimate interests of consumers in the digital market space. The EU Consumer Protection 2.0 study, commissioned by Bureau européen des unions de consommateurs (BEUC), provided a first comprehensive account of the potential deficit and proposed a possible remedy to rethink the existing consumer acquis in light of ‘structural, architectural and universal vulnerability’, to be translated into the legal concept of ‘digital asymmetry’.