Brussels, BELGIUM – The European Commission today adopted the Consumer Agenda 2025-2030, outlining its strategy to strengthen consumer protection over the next five years.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA Europe) takes note of the Agenda, and stresses that the Commission’s primary focus should be on empowering Europeans to fully leverage the robust rules and consumer protections available to them.
For the Agenda to truly succeed, it must prioritise decisive reform of the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Regulation before pursuing any other legislative measures. Similarly, the comprehensive framework already in place needs greater clarity. CCIA Europe cautions the Commission against adopting an overly negative view, which risks denying the significant benefits of e-commerce.
While European consumers have seen significant progress in recent years, the Commission’s framing appears to mainly focus on risks and leans heavily on perceived failures in compliance. This ignores the crucial fact that the EU already has one of the world’s most robust and comprehensive architectures for consumer protection.
Today’s challenge is not a shortage of EU rules, but rather regulators and enforcers (at both national and EU levels) struggling to keep pace with the framework available. Indeed, many laws have recently been adopted to protect users and address problematic online practices.
Instead of more regulation, Europe needs effective and coordinated enforcement that uses existing tools and strengthens mechanisms like the CPC network. The same approach should guide labelling requirements. CCIA Europe supports renewed attention to digital tools for product information, but warns that overlapping initiatives (e.g. the EU Product Act, Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, and Omnibus IV) risk creating confusion.
CCIA Europe stresses that the Consumer Agenda must also address the current fragmentation in actions undertaken by various national authorities, which continues to create a regulatory patchwork that undermines the Single Market.
The following can be attributed to CCIA Europe’s Privacy and Safety Lead, Claudia Canelles Quaroni:
“The European Union has spent the last few years building the world’s strongest regulatory framework for consumers in the digital age. However, both regulators and consumers are still struggling to navigate and leverage all those recent EU laws and protections.”
“Now is the time to focus on strengthened and coordinated enforcement of what we already have. More rules won’t solve compliance gaps, nor will any unfair targeting of specific sectors due to a small portion of non-compliant services.”
