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Summary of the panel ‘Dark Patterns‘30.10.2025

The next summary of the LIDC Congress 2025 in Vienna concerns the panel on ‘Dark Patterns’ as manipulative digital design practices with the question: ‘Old legal issues in a new style or a need for further regulation?’.

Barbara Kuchar as chair explained in her introduction that the topic reflects the central tension between innovation and manipulation in the digital world. The key questions are whether these are actually new challenges or merely familiar unfair business practices in a modern form and, if the latter is true, why combating them remains so difficult in practice.
Matthias Hofer kicked things off with an overview of the concept of dark patterns and the relevant case law. Using decisions from Planet49 (ECJ C-673/17) to current proceedings against platforms such as Temu and Eventim he illustrated the increasing importance of manipulative online designs in the European and international enforcement context.
Dr. Christian Handig - Mitarbeiter:in - WKO provided an overview of the existing EU legal framework in relation to dark patterns. He stated that the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) already provides a solid foundation for combating manipulative design practices. Supplementary regulations can be found in particular in the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Directive (EU) 2023/2673 on the distance marketing of financial services, the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) and the Data Act. Referring to the ECJ ruling in case Compass Banca (ECJ C-646/22), he emphasised that even averagely informed and attentive consumers can be impaired in their freedom of choice by cognitive biases.

Susanne Augenhofer then presented the systematic and legal policy developments at European level. She reflected that the multitude of parallel regulations made it difficult to achieve a coherent understanding and significantly hampered enforcement. The European Commission's current ‘Digital Fairness Check’ and the planned ‘Fairness Act’ therefore aim to better integrate existing legal acts. She argued that the focus should be less on new laws and more on effective interpretation, consistent application and consistent enforcement of existing regulations.
Francis (Chen) Yang Yang supplemented the overview by presenting the Asian and in particular Chinese perspective. He pointed out that in these legal systems, the fight against manipulative online designs is also increasingly becoming a focus of attention especially in connection with e-commerce and data protection and used practical case studies to explain court practice in China, for example that making it impossible to delete an app has been recognised as an inadmissible practice.
This discussion was concluded by asking the audience who agreed with the panel's view that although no new legislation was needed, guidelines for combating dark patterns would be helpful for more effective enforcement.

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Summary of the panel ‘Dark Patterns‘30.10.2025

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