The Digital Fairness Act (DFA) is a legislative proposal by the European Commission. [1] [2] Michael McGrath, EU Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law and Consumer Protection, will be responsible for this legislation under Ursula von der Leyen's second Commission. [3] The legislation will tackle dark patterns, personalisation, contracts, and influencer marketing. [4] [5] [6] The Commission has stated that there will be a 12-week long public consultation starting in spring 2025, [7] and the Digital Fairness Act will not be proposed before 2026. [8] [9]
Andreas Schwab is a German politician and member of the European Parliament for Germany. He is a member of the Christian Democratic Union, part of the European People's Party. Since 2009, he has been Of Counsel with CMS Hasche Sigle.
Information privacy, data privacy or data protection laws provide a legal framework on how to obtain, use and store data of natural persons. The various laws around the world describe the rights of natural persons to control who is using their data. This includes usually the right to get details on which data is stored, for what purpose and to request the deletion in case the purpose is not given anymore.
The Commissioner for Health and Food Safety is the member of the European Commission. The current Commissioner is Olivér Várhelyi who is responsible for health and animal welfare. The portfolio is responsible for matters of public health, food safety, animal health and plant health.
Michael McGrath is an Irish Fianna Fáil politician and EU Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law and Consumer Protection. He served as Minister for Finance from December 2022 to June 2024. He served as Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform from 2020 to 2022. He was a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Cork South-Central constituency from 2007 to 2024.
The Delegation of the European Union to the United States represents the European Union in the United States, working in coordination with the diplomatic and consular missions of all 27 EU Member States. It is located at 2175 K Street, N.W., in the West End neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
Iliana Naydenova Ivanova is a Member of the European Court of Auditors since 2025. She previously served as European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth between 2023 and 2024.
The Juncker Commission was the European Commission in office from 1 November 2014 to 30 November 2019. Its president was Jean-Claude Juncker, who presided over 27 other commissioners. In July 2014, Juncker was officially elected to succeed José Manuel Barroso, who completed his second five-year term in that year.
The term digital single market refers to the policy objective of eliminating national or other jurisdictional barriers to online transactions, building on the common market concept designed to remove trade barriers in other commercial fields.
Euractiv is a European news website focused on EU policies, founded in 1999 by the French media publisher Christophe Leclercq. Its headquarters and central editorial staff are located in Brussels, with other offices in Paris and Berlin. Its content is produced by about 50 journalists staffed in Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
A dark pattern is a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills. User experience designer Harry Brignull coined the neologism on 28 July 2010 with the registration of darkpatterns.org, a "pattern library with the specific goal of naming and shaming deceptive user interfaces". In 2023 he released the book Deceptive Patterns.
Marcel Kolaja is a Czech software engineer, Internet freedom and digital rights activist and a former Czech Pirate Party politician who served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 to 2024 and Quaestor of the European Parliament from 2022 to 2024. He was a member of the Greens–European Free Alliance parliamentary group along with three other European Pirate Party MEPs.
The von der Leyen Commission was the European Commission in office from 1 December 2019 to 30 November 2024. It consisted of one commissioner from each of the member states of the European Union – including Ursula von der Leyen, its president, who is from Germany.
The Capital Markets Union (CMU) is an economic policy initiative launched by the former president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker in the initial exposition of his policy agenda on 15 July 2014. The main target was to create a single market for capital in the whole territory of the EU by the end of 2019. The reasoning behind the idea was to address the issue that corporate finance relies on debt (i.e. bank loans) and the fact that capital markets in Europe were not sufficiently integrated so as to protect the EU and especially the Eurozone from future crisis. The Five Presidents Report of June 2015 proposed the CMU in order to complement the Banking union of the European Union and eventually finish the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) project. The CMU is supposed to attract 2000 billion dollars more on the European capital markets, on the long-term.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) is an EU regulation adopted in 2022 that addresses illegal content, transparent advertising and disinformation. It updates the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000 in EU law, and was proposed alongside the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is an EU regulation that aims to make the digital economy fairer and more contestable. The regulation entered into force on 1 November 2022 and became applicable, for the most part, on 2 May 2023.
The Data Act is a European Union regulation which aims to facilitate and promote the exchange and use of data within the European Economic Area.
The Trade and Technology Council (TTC) is a transatlantic political body which serves as a diplomatic forum to coordinate technology and trade policy between the United States and European Union. It is composed of ten working groups, each focusing on specific policy areas. The formation of the TTC was first announced by US president Joe Biden and the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on June 15, 2021. The early agenda focused primarily on US-EU cooperation in technology, strategic sectors, market access, trade, democratic values and rule of law in the digital world, supply chain resilience, the global trade order and the EU's developing regulatory agenda like Digital Services Act, Data Act and Cloud Rules. The TTC was established under the leadership of five co-chairs – European Commission executive vice-president Margrethe Vestager, European Commission executive vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis, US secretary of state Antony Blinken, US secretary of commerce Gina Raimondo, and US trade representative Katherine Tai.
The Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse is a European Union regulation proposed by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson on 11 May 2022. The stated aim of the legislation is to prevent child sexual abuse online through the implementation of a number of measures, including the establishment of a framework that would make the detection and reporting of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by digital platforms – known by its critics as Chat Control – a legal requirement within the European Union.
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is an EU regulation for improving cybersecurity and cyber resilience in the EU through common cybersecurity standards for products with digital elements in the EU, such as required incident reports and automatic security updates. Products with digital elements mainly are hardware and software whose "intended and foreseeable use includes direct or indirect data connection to a device or network".