ETD

• addictive design
• addictive patterns
• dark patterns
• digital addiction
• digital fairness
• DSA
• unfair commercial practices

Digital platforms have increasingly organised their services around architectural choices set to capture the attentional resources of their users with the purpose of maximising business interests. Framed in EU policy discussions as 'addictive design', these engagement-maximising features — infinite scroll, autoplay, variable rewards, push notifications and retention-optimised recommender systems — have moved to the centre of the digital fairness agenda, from the European Parliament's 2023 resolution on the addictive design of online services to the European Commission's preliminary findings against TikTok (February 2026) and Meta (July 2026) and the announcement of a Digital Fairness Act (DFA). This thesis asks to what extent the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) and the forthcoming DFA form a coherent regulatory response to addictive design on online platforms, and what gaps, overlaps or tensions persist in their interaction.
The thesis first develops a working definition of addictive design by situating it within earlier framings of digital addiction — Internet addiction, smartphone addiction and social media addiction — and the unsettled debates on problematic use of the Internet and of social media, where heterogeneous assessment instruments and the absence of a formally recognised disorder have hindered diagnostic consensus. It argues that this clinical uncertainty does not diminish the regulatory salience of the phenomenon: recent evidence reviews converge in showing that dysregulated, problematic and passive patterns of engagement — rather than time spent as such — most reliably predict harms to mental health, self-evaluation and autonomy, particularly among minors and other vulnerable users. These patterns are then traced to the business-model rationale of the attention economy, in which habit-forming design deliberately serves engagement-driven monetisation. The conceptual analysis closes by examining the contested relationship between addictive design and dark patterns, contrasting scholarly attempts to subsume the former within the dark patterns taxonomy with the Commission's Digital Fairness Fitness Check, which treats the two as distinct categories of problematic practices.
Against this background, the thesis assesses the existing EU legal framework. It examines how far the DSA reaches — through the Article 25 prohibition of dark patterns and the systemic-risk regime of Articles 34 and 35 for very large online platforms — and where it stops, drawing on the Commission's enforcement findings concerning TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. It then tests whether addictive design can already be caught by the UCPD as an unfair commercial practice, building on the Digital Fairness Fitness Check (SWD(2024) 230) and on the interaction between Article 25 DSA and the UCPD. Finally, it turns to the forthcoming DFA and its mission to address addictive design, evaluating whether the proposed instrument closes the gaps identified in the preceding analysis.
The thesis concludes that the current framework captures addictive design only partially and indirectly, through provisions designed for adjacent problems, and formulates recommendations for the forthcoming DFA. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the pursuit of digital fairness for consumers in EU law at the moment when its regulatory architecture is being redrawn.