On 12 May 2026, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used a Copenhagen summit on AI and children to confirm that the Digital Fairness Act (DFA) is coming, with a proposal pencilled in for the fourth quarter of 2026. The Act targets a now-familiar list: dark patterns, addictive design, influencer marketing, and "unfair personalisation practices." What the announcement understated is that the DFA lands at the exact moment TikTok stops being only a feed. The same recommender system Brussels has flagged as dangerously engaging is now the storefront of one of Europe's fastest-growing retailers.
Two regulatory tracks converging on one product
The DFA is not arriving in a vacuum. On 6 February 2026, the Commission issued a preliminary finding that TikTok's "infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and its highly personalised recommender system" breach the Digital Services Act by fostering compulsive use — the first DSA enforcement action aimed not at illegal content but at the architecture of the product itself. Under Article 74 of the DSA, a confirmed breach can cost up to 6% of global annual turnover.
Meanwhile, the commercial layer beneath that feed has scaled fast. TikTok Shop now counts over 100,000 sellers across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Ireland, and on 15 June 2026 it expands to Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland — ten EU markets in total. In Spain it became the 16th-largest online retailer by GMV within 18 months; in Germany, faster still. The point is structural: the addictive scroll the DSA wants to dampen and the conversion engine that monetises it are the same surface.
Steelman the regulator first
The case for the DFA is genuinely strong, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The Commission's own Digital Fairness Fitness Check concluded that existing consumer law — the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, the Consumer Rights Directive — only "partially achieved" its objectives online. When a personalised feed nudges a vulnerable teenager from a dance video into a one-tap impulse purchase, the line between content and commerce is precisely where consumer harm hides. A regulator that ignored embedded social commerce would be fighting the last war. And the addictive-design findings rest on a real evidentiary record: internal risk assessments, scientific literature, and indicators TikTok allegedly disregarded, such as how long minors spend on the app at night.
The strongest version of the regulators' position is that fairness obligations should follow the function, not the label. If a feed sells, the seller's duties — honest pricing, no manipulative urgency, real cancellation rights — should attach regardless of whether the company calls itself a "social network."
Where proportionality has to hold the line
That principle is right. The risk is in the execution. Three failure modes would turn a defensible law into an innovation tax.
- Don't legislate by platform name. A rule that treats "social commerce" as a special, suspect category invites arbitrage: every retailer will argue its app is "really" e-commerce, and every feed will argue it is "really" media. The durable approach is conduct-based — ban the specific manipulative practice (countdown timers that reset, fake scarcity, drip pricing, confirmshaming) wherever it appears, including on Amazon and Shein, not a bespoke regime aimed at one Chinese-owned app.
- Avoid double and triple jeopardy. TikTok already faces DSA scrutiny on addictive design, DSA advertising-transparency commitments, GDPR enforcement, and the Digital Markets Act. Layering a fourth instrument with overlapping definitions of "manipulation" creates legal uncertainty that large incumbents can absorb and the 100,000 European small sellers on TikTok Shop cannot. Consolidation, not accumulation, is the proportionate move.
- Separate harm to minors from a blanket ban on persuasion. Endless autoplay aimed at children is a defensible target. "Personalised recommendations" as such are not a defect — they are how a small seller in Poland reaches a buyer in Spain. A law that cannot tell exploitative personalisation from useful discovery will suppress the cross-border SME growth that is one of the single market's rare digital success stories.
The harder question Brussels is avoiding
The deepest issue the DFA raises is whether the EU actually wants to mandate a structural separation between feed and shop — a digital-era echo of Glass-Steagall. There is intellectual appeal to it: friction between scrolling and buying would blunt impulse harm. But forced unbundling of a product's content and commerce layers would be an extraordinary intervention, closer to industrial design mandate than consumer protection, and the Commission has not made that case or done the analysis to support it. If that is the real ambition, it belongs in an open impact assessment, not smuggled in through "addictive design" language.
The honest path is narrower and more effective: enforce the DSA addictive-design case to its conclusion, port a tight, conduct-based ban on the worst commercial dark patterns into the DFA, and apply it neutrally across every retailer. That protects the teenager without conscripting the small seller — and it answers the feed-or-shop question the only way that survives contact with how people actually use the internet: both, and the law should police the practice, not the architecture.