EU Digital Fairness Act Covers Gambling as European Lotteries Seek a Carve-Out

The European Commission's Digital Fairness Act, proposed on 11 November, has no gambling exclusion and covers influencer marketing, paid random rewards and addictive design. The European Lotteries wants the Parliament and Council to add one.

• The European Lotteries (EL) asked the European Parliament and the Council on 11 November to exclude lotteries and gambling from the Digital Fairness Act (DFA)
• The European Commission proposed the DFA the same day, as a regulation that would replace the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive
• The text has no gambling exclusion, though it leaves national authorisation regimes, including gambling rules, untouched
• Its rules on influencer marketing, paid random rewards and addictive design apply to all traders, and a recital names betting and lotteries as unsuitable for influencer promotion
• EL says national gambling law and the Digital Services Act already cover this ground and that enforcement against unlicensed operators matters more

The Commission Proposes Its Digital Fairness Act and the Lotteries Ask for a Way Out

The European Commission presented its proposal for a Digital Fairness Act on 11 November, with a revision of the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Regulation. The proposal, COM(2026) 1100 final, is a regulation that would repeal the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) and make its rules directly applicable in every member state. Commissioner Michael McGrath, who presented it with Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, called the package "the most significant reform of EU consumer protection rules in more than 20 years". The Commission puts consumer savings at up to €13.7 billion a year.

EL's response, dated Brussels, 11 November, says the association shares the Commission's objective but that the DFA must "take into account the particular nature of lotteries and gambling". It cites Court of Justice case law on member states' discretion over gambling, the sector's exclusion from the Services and E-Commerce Directives, and subsidiarity. With EU consumer, data, media and platform law, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), already applying alongside national gambling law, EL says, the priority is enforcement.

"Adding further obligations for licensed operators is no substitute for effective enforcement against those operating outside the law," said Piet Van Baeveghem, EL Secretary General. The release does not discuss any specific article of the proposal.

In its October 2025 consultation response, EL preferred guidelines to new binding law and asked that the DFA require platforms to verify the licensing status of gambling operators and their advertisers. An April 2026 paper mapped how national rules handle nine practices, from dark patterns to digital contracts, and called for gambling to be excluded "as such". EL made a related case in September, when it pitched the lottery model to Brussels as a democracy argument.

What the Text Says About Gambling

Article 2 reproduces the UCPD's scope and is without prejudice to authorisation regimes; recital 12 says these include rules that "relate to gambling activities". Recital 11 says member states should not impose further obligations on traders to raise consumer protection unless authorised, and Article 2(8) allows stricter national rules only for financial services and property.

Several provisions would reach gambling operators as traders. Article 11 bars influencer marketing of products whose advertising is banned under Union or national law, and recital 55 names "betting, lotteries or other forms of gambling products" as potentially unsuitable. Article 15 requires traders offering paid random-reward items, such as loot boxes and wheels of fortune, to disclose the probability of obtaining each item, let consumers switch them off and keep them from minors. Article 17 lets consumers turn off autoplay, unprompted notifications and regular-engagement rewards on products likely to encourage compulsive use.

A Regulation Makes the Missing Carve-Out Matter More

A regulation gives the scope question its weight. Many national regimes treat advertising bans and bonus limits as licence conditions, which Article 2(7) protects. But recital 11 bars national top-ups to consumer protection, and only finance and property are excepted. Where a gambling rule ends and a consumer rule begins would be argued case by case; an express exclusion would settle it. The Parliament resolutions the proposal cites, though, asked for action on addictive design and loot boxes, a hard backdrop for a carve-out.

Licensed Operators Already Run Many of These Controls

EL's April paper lists Spain, Germany, Italy and Finland as restricting personalised marketing to minors, self-excluded players or those at risk, so for licensed lotteries much of the DFA may mean paperwork rather than new conduct. The text does not say whether an online instant-win game counts as a random-reward item, a border regulators are already testing: Poland's consumer watchdog is hunting dark patterns in betting apps, and Spain's loot box ban fell while its deposit limits stood.

The Platform Check EL Wanted Is Not in the Text

The proposal does not require platforms to check whether gambling advertisers are licensed, the measure EL sought in 2025. That gap stays with the DSA, where a study for the Commission found in October that strong advertiser verification remains the exception. For a sector whose main complaint is unlicensed competition, that matters more.

The Commission has written a consumer law that covers gambling and leaves national licensing regimes standing. Whether co-legislators go further and take gambling out altogether will decide how much of the DFA licensed operators actually have to absorb.