The European Digital Fairness Act (DFA), which the Commission will table at the end of 2026 under the portfolio of Michael McGrath, is being drafted in the grammar of consumer protection. For adults, that grammar holds. For children, it is the wrong category. A child cannot meaningfully consent to the architectural shaping of the very faculties through which she would, as an adult, consent. No improvement of the consent regime – clearer notice, shorter withdrawal periods, easier redress – can resolve a problem the architecture itself produces by altering the competence each consumer-law instrument presupposes. The European legal order is not, however, without resources for this kind of asymmetry. It has spent five decades building, through repeated specification, a doctrine of personal integrity that already covers the ground the DFA needs. What I want to argue here is that the missing piece is not a new right but the named extension of a method Europe already practises: the specification of a fourth layer of integrity for subjects in formation, grounded in the Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU Charter) and made operational by the legal occasion that the DFA provides … (more)
[Chayma Drira, Verfassungsblog, 26 May 2026]
Leave a Reply