Opening remarks Cateautje Hijmans van den Bergh to the ACM conference on fair design in e-commerce
Good afternoon,
I’m delighted to welcome you all to this seminar on fair design in e-commerce: welcome to you who came to our offices and to you attending online from many different places around the world. It is uplifting to see so many people from business, academia, policy and enforcement interested in the topic of fair design in e-commerce. A multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder dialogue is, in my view, the key to the promotion of fair design principles in consumer choice environments, and to having those principles put into practice.
This week, the ACM celebrates its 10th anniversary. Before April 1st 2013, consumer protection law in the Netherlands was enforced by a stand-alone Consumer Authority, that employed 45 people. Integrating sector-specific regulation, competition law and consumer protection enforcement, our unifying principle has been that, as an authority, we aim to promote markets that work well for people and businesses. For consumers, well working markets are markets in which they can make free and well-informed choices, and in which their vulnerabilities are not exploited.
The character of those consumer markets has changed dramatically in the past 10 years. Developments in online commerce have provided consumers with new ways to navigate choice and get access to markets. But they have also presented new challenges: how to move in social meeting places that are highly commercialised and in which it may be hard to distinguish between genuine and a commercially driven advice? How to maintain autonomy, while your data are being reaped for targeted marketing? How to make sensible choices in commercial environments that continuously push the buttons of your behavioral biases?
Looking forward to the next 10 years, these challenges will even become more pressing as we see commercial environments become ever more-immersive with the development of AR and VR based interfaces and AI based interactions. In our view, these challenges require a shift in consumer protection from merely preventing deception to a positive commitment to fair design.
The ACM has taken two routes to foster this commitment
- Firstly, we’ve provided guidance on how existing consumer protection rules apply to design choices in online commercial environments in our Guidelines on the Protection of Online Consumers. We are happy to see that the main notions and some of the examples from these guidelines have been integrated in the EC UCPD Notices and adopted by other national consumer protection authorities
- And secondly, we’ve advocated modernisation of the consumer protection rules towards a stronger embedding of “fairness by design.” In our response tot he EU fitness check on digital fairness, our main recommendations were:
- the introduction of a duty of care for traders to create fair commercial environments for online consumers
- redefinition of the ‘average consumer’, reflecting a more realistic image of consumer behaviour and capacities
- a more realistic approach towards transparency as a remedy for asymmetries between consumer and trader.
This afternoon, we aim to foster dialogue, to provide insights and practical guidance for the benefit of fair design for consumers in online environments. I wish you all a very inspiring and fruitful afternoon. And I look forward to the next 10 years of public consumer protection in the Netherlands.