A thirteen-year-old opens her phone after school. She moves through six apps in less than five minutes, sliding from short videos to influencer stories to quiet prompts to buy something she has never heard of. None of it feels like advertising. None of it feels manipulative. It feels like her world, shaped for her. What she does not see is the infrastructure beneath the screen, a maze of behavioural nudges, micro-persuasions and hidden design choices that slowly shape what she wants and how she behaves.
This is the silent tension that sits at the center of Europe’s debate over the Digital Fairness Act. The conversation often sounds technical, but the stakes are cultural and psychological. Euroconsumers’ detailed response to the European Commission’s consultation, published in late October, is not just an industry position paper. It reads like a warning about what it means to grow up inside a digital environment that has outpaced the laws meant to protect the people living in it.
Their document focuses sharply on minors. Not as an afterthought, but as the heart of the issue. Children are no longer passive users dipping into the internet for the occasional game or search. They have become full participants in vast commercial ecosystems, yet the systems around them still treat them as citizens of a world that no longer exists. Euroconsumers notes that only forty three percent of young users consistently recognise when they are being advertised to. Thirteen percent say they never do. The boundary between expression and persuasion has blurred to the point that even adults struggle to navigate it. Expecting children to do so alone is unrealistic.
The problem goes beyond advertising. It lives inside the architecture of digital design. Subscription models invite users in with frictionless offers yet punish them with invisible hoops when they try to leave. Dark patterns turn decisions into traps. Recommendation algorithms amplify impulses long before a young person has the ability to question them. The most intimate parts of childhood exploration now unfold inside systems built primarily for engagement and monetisation rather than agency and development.
Europe knows this. Its regulators have spent years stitching together a patchwork of rules to tame the largest players in the digital market. But Euroconsumers makes a point that has been missing from the public debate. Europe’s rules exist mostly in theory, while enforcement remains fragmented in practice. Countries differ in capacity. Cross-border monitoring is slow. Global platforms move faster than local regulators, and they adjust to weak points the moment they appear. Without coordinated enforcement across the single market, consumer protection becomes a patchwork of good intentions rather than a coherent system.
The Digital Fairness Act is supposed to address that. Yet the deeper question is whether Europe wants to limit harm or redesign the experience entirely. Euroconsumers pushes for something more ambitious than a list of prohibitions. They argue that minors should not only be protected but invited into the conversation. If young people live inside these systems more fluently than most policymakers, why should they be treated as passive objects of protection rather than active contributors to the rules that govern their digital lives? It is a quiet but radical suggestion. It reframes digital fairness as a shared public project rather than a top-down corrective.
This is the moment when Europe must decide what kind of digital world it wants to build. If it sees digital regulation only as a shield, it will spend the next decade chasing bad actors as they innovate around every new rule. If it sees digital regulation as architecture, it can shape markets that reward transparent design, empower user agency and protect the people who are most vulnerable to persuasive technologies.
The opportunity is larger than it seems. Fairness is not the enemy of innovation. It is the foundation on which trust is built, and trust is the currency of every functioning digital ecosystem. A marketplace where reviews can be trusted, cancellations are honest and minors understand the content they consume creates space for European businesses to compete on quality rather than opacity. It strengthens the digital single market by aligning incentives rather than scattering them.
Greece, like many smaller member states, sits at a crossroads in this debate. Its digital adoption is strong, but its enforcement capacity has limits. This makes Greek consumers disproportionately affected by fragmented European protections. It also creates a strategic opportunity. If Greece positions itself as a leader in digital fairness, it can elevate its entire ecosystem of innovation, policy and consumer trust. In a region where digital confidence is often fragile, this could become a competitive advantage.
The world our children inhabit will not slow down. The feed will not pause. The platforms will not wait for regulators to catch up. The question is whether Europe will continue asking how to stop the worst behaviour or whether it will learn to design systems that make the worst behaviour impossible. The Euroconsumers response hints at the path ahead. It recognises that fairness is not merely legal compliance. It is a design principle. And if Europe chooses to treat it as such, the Digital Fairness Act could become the first major step toward a digital environment where agency and dignity are not exceptions but defaults.
The stakes are simple. When a child opens a phone, they should enter a world that respects them. Not a marketplace that shapes them without their knowledge. The Digital Fairness Act will show whether Europe is ready to make that promise real.
