EU Digital Fairness Act: What the proposal means for gambling operators

Licensing stays with member states, but the new rules on notifications, influencers, and ad targeting could reach operators, with fines of up to 6% of global turnover when the Commission investigates.

A new EU proposal, the Digital Fairness Act, sets out how online services should handle design, social media endorsements, and personalised advertising. Several of its obligations are likely to reach the websites and apps of licensed gambling businesses.

What the Commission proposed

The Commission adopted the Digital Fairness Act proposal on 11 November 2026, alongside a Simplification Directive and a revision of the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Regulation. The proposal targets dark patterns, addictive design, practices that encourage overspending, unfair personalisation, influencer marketing, and subscriptions that are hard to cancel.

The Commission estimates the rules could save EU consumers up to €13.7 billion a year. The proposal puts the recurring cost to businesses at €1.2 billion a year.

Michael McGrath, Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law and Consumer Protection, said:

‘The Digital Fairness Act, together with the update to the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation, represents the most significant reform of EU consumer protection rules in more than 20 years.’

He presented the package at a press conference in Brussels alongside Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen.

Gambling licensing stays national

The proposal text says the regulation is without prejudice to national authorisation regimes, and its recitals name rules relating to gambling activities specifically. Licensing and market access remain with member states, and national gambling laws still go through EU checks of their own. In August, Austria notified its gambling law reform to the European Commission.

The regulation pursues full harmonisation, so member states could not add stricter general consumer rules on top of it unless the text allows them to. It applies to business-to-consumer commercial practices before, during, and after a transaction, and it contains no general exemption for gambling operators.

The obligations fall on ‘traders’, which Article 3 defines as anyone acting for business purposes in their dealings with consumers. A licensed gambling operator dealing with players is a trader in this sense, so each rule below applies to operators whenever their products or marketing fall within it.

Notifications, streaks, and prompts

Article 17 covers traders whose products are designed to encourage compulsive or excessive use, or can reasonably be expected to. These traders would have to give consumers easy tools to switch off four types of feature, one at a time or all at once.

The four are autoplay and uninterrupted content, notifications not triggered by the user’s own activity, features that reward regular engagement or penalise missed sessions, and features that simulate interpersonal relations, such as persistent prompts from an automated system.

Push notifications and daily rewards are where operators’ products are most likely to meet these rules. The Commission can add further features to the list through delegated acts.

Suppliers say they already build games for limits like these. In European Gaming’s casino entertainment trends roundtable, ICONIC21 said its games accommodate market-specific requirements around pacing and autoplay.

Andrii Savyntsev, product owner team lead at ICONIC21, said:

‘If a feature only performs because it pushes play beyond what a regulator considers safe, it isn’t a good feature, and it won’t survive in the markets that matter long term.’

Loot boxes and paid-for rewards

Article 15 deals with paid-for variable reward systems. The proposal’s recitals give loot boxes, wheels of fortune, and collectible card packs as examples and say they ‘share the speculative features of gambling’. Traders offering them would have to disclose the probability of obtaining each reward and give consumers a tool to switch these systems off.

The proposal defines these systems as virtual items, other than financial products, that offer random rewards or variable odds and are bought with money or with paid-for virtual currency. It does not say how that definition relates to licensed gambling products. Operators that sell paid prize wheels or mystery rewards inside their apps would need to check whether those features fall within it.

Gambling regulators are already looking at where gaming and gambling overlap. In October, the Danish Gambling Authority launched a campaign on gambling elements in children’s games.

Influencers and targeted advertising

In a member state that bans gambling advertising, that would also rule out influencer promotion of gambling. The recitals name betting, lotteries, and other gambling products among the harmful or unsuitable products some influencers promote.

Article 12 bans ads targeted through profiling that uses special categories of personal data under the GDPR, which include health data. For operators, that would rule out targeting players on the basis of such data.

Article 13 bars personalised pricing that is likely to cause harm where the trader is reasonably certain the consumer is vulnerable because of age, credulity, disability, or serious personal circumstances.

Fines and next steps

Member states would set the penalties. For widespread infringements handled through coordinated CPC enforcement, maximum fines would have to be at least 4% of the trader’s annual turnover in the countries concerned, or at least €2 million where turnover figures are unavailable.

Where the Commission investigates a case itself under the revised CPC Regulation, it could fine up to 6% of worldwide annual turnover.

The proposal now goes to the European Parliament and the Council. As a regulation it would apply directly in every member state, starting 12 months after it enters into force, which happens 20 days after publication in the EU’s Official Journal. The start date therefore depends on how long negotiations take.

The post EU Digital Fairness Act: What the proposal means for gambling operators appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.