Have we learned our lesson — or are we simply reinventing ourselves into another hundred paragraphs of regulation?
By Filip Kužma, Director of the Smart Consumer Institute
Many of our innovation ambitions — whether it’s promoting digitalisation, strengthening competitiveness, or pursuing another, in essence, necessary goal — tend to follow a very similar storyline.
In Slovakia, we often draft a strategy, develop an action plan, establish a working group or a government council, host a conference or a roundtable, and post catchy messages on social media. A great deal of activity, often even correctly identifying the problems — yet very little real change.
And this pattern isn’t unique to Slovakia. It repeats across Europe.
Draghi’s hope
Last autumn, many economists — though well aware of how similar initiatives often end — welcomed the plan put forward by former European Central Bank president and Italian prime minister Mario Draghi to revive economic growth in the European Union.
Among other things, Draghi warned that the EU’s environment is becoming excessively complex and fragmented — in short, overregulated. This, he argued, creates barriers to growth and discourages foreign investment and innovation.
If internal EU barriers were reduced to the level prevailing in the United States, the bloc’s labor productivity could be about 7 percent higher after seven years.
In dozens of pages, Draghi laid out his “roadmap” for improving the EU’s competitiveness, arguing that unless these barriers are eased and a truly single market is created, Europe will continue to lag behind a more agile America and China.
Fashionable façades
In the Czech adaptation of ABBA’s Money, Money, Money, the famous singers Helena Vondráčková and Hana Zagorová perform the line: “… fazónu módní musíme dát, aby to mělo vkus a švih a elegantní moderní střih” — “We have to give it a fashionable shape so that it has taste, flair, and an elegant modern cut.”
The European Commission seems to have taken that to heart. Over the past year, it has unveiled initiatives with catchy names like the Competitiveness Compass or the Clean Industrial Deal.
Yet an analysis by the think tank EPIC paints a sobering picture: out of a total of 383 recommendations, only 11.2 percent have been fully implemented. Even after accounting for partial progress, the EU has achieved only 31.4 percent of Draghi’s agenda. The EU is moving too slowly. As Draghi recently noted, the region is failing to match the speed of a changing global order.
From one angle, Draghi himself recently called for a “radical simplification” of the GDPR and even a pause on implementing parts of the AI Act. From another, however, the European Commission continues to roll out new ambitious proposals that may sound appealing but raise serious questions about whether they might, in fact, achieve the exact opposite of Draghi’s goals.
Digital fairness for all
In just a few days, on 24 October, the first round of public consultation will close on the Digital Fairness Act initiative. This is not yet a legislative proposal — the draft law itself is expected only in the third quarter of 2026 — but its main focus areas are already clear.
The goal is to curb “unethical techniques and commercial practices related to manipulative interface design (dark patterns), misleading marketing by social media influencers, addictive design of digital products and online profiling, especially where consumer vulnerabilities are exploited for commercial purposes.”
What does such digital unfairness look like in practice? The examples speak for themselves: an influencer fails to disclose a paid partnership; a travel agency advertises a dream holiday for €1,000 per person but forgets to include mandatory airport fees of €280; or an online store calculates a discount based on a misleading comparison price.
It also includes personalised ads and prices — when social media or browsers show ads tailored to our behaviour, or when two people open the same taxi app, enter the same route, yet one receives a higher fare.
Paper never refused ink
This brings us to the heart of Draghi’s criticism — overregulation. Paper never refused ink, but real enforcement of new laws is far more complicated. It’s easy to adopt more and more rules, but the real question is: who will ensure their consistent enforcement? And ultimately, aren’t we using new laws to conceal the fact that we fail to enforce the ones we already have?
Over the past decade, the EU has adopted numerous sweeping digital packages — most famously the GDPR, but also the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD).
As Slovakia’s Council for Media Services noted in its submission to this consultation, “most of these practices are already covered by existing legislation…the regulatory practice of the CMS, as coordinator of digital services, shows that the full potential of the DSA has not yet been carried out.” It adds that “the DSA and AVMSD already contain robust provisions covering dark patterns, unfair personalization practices, influencer marketing, and protection of minors.”
We are adding new, extensive regulatory packages to the already massive ones before them — yet we have not even given the original laws a proper chance to take effect. The same Council statement notes that several implementation guidelines are still in preparation.
What next?
Few would deny that certain digital practices are openly problematic. Personally, I find opaque algorithms unacceptable — those that, based on unclear criteria, decide which consumer pays more for the same service.
I also understand the frustration of over a million gamers who see developers “switch off” the games they bought legitimately, leaving them with nothing but wasted money and disappointment, even though such shutdowns were never disclosed at the time of sale.
Then there are areas I see in more balanced terms — such as personalised advertising. Its use is already restricted in several cases, for instance when targeting children or sensitive categories such as religion or sexual orientation.
Looking at Slovak stakeholders’ positions on the proposed additional restrictions on personalised advertising, it’s clear that this debate is far from black-and-white. Personalised advertising cannot be dismissed as inherently negative; in certain contexts, it can contribute to competitiveness — the very principle Draghi emphasises.
According to a study cited in one of these submissions, firms in six countries (Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Croatia) consistently report tangible benefits from online advertising.
In every market, at least three-quarters of respondents can link — at least to some extent — online advertising with measurable business outcomes such as revenue growth or new customer acquisition. Over 80% are also inclined to say that online ads help them compete with larger or more established firms.
European legislation affects us all, even though we often see it only through its abbreviations. A nice façade, however, is not enough. Progress in any field doesn’t come from grand gestures, but from the daily, somewhat tedious, yet diligent work.
And it is precisely there — in precise implementation guidelines and consistent enforcement of existing legislation, not in new lofty declarations — that Europe’s greatest contribution may lie.
The article was also published on Medium: https://medium.com/@SmartConsumerInstitute/overregulated-europe-even-draghis-plan-may-not-be-enough-to-catch-up-with-the-us-and-china-611e13ab9bbd.