Not Every Recommendation Is a Trap
It's late at night, and somewhere in Europe, someone has just finished a film on a streaming service devoted entirely to horror. Or to anime, or documentaries, or Korean drama—the kind of arthouse cinema you will not find at the multiplex. As the credits roll, the service suggests an obscure title from decades ago, surfaced because a human curator and a smart algorithm decided it belonged next. They watch it. They love it. And that single suggestion is the whole reason they pay for a small, specialised service instead of letting the same film sit buried in a catalogue of a hundred thousand others.
Now imagine a new European law so eager to ban manipulative ‘dark patterns’ that it can’t tell the difference between that helpful suggestion and a fake countdown clock screaming "only two left."
That is the risk hidden inside the Digital Fairness Act.
To be fair, the Act targets real problems. Subscription traps are real. So are interfaces engineered to make cancelling feel like defusing a bomb, and advertising dressed up as something it isn't. These practices undermine the trust that the digital economy runs on, and Europe is right to confront them. The members of Beyond Mainstream, specialised streaming services built for specific audiences, have no interest in defending such practices. Where consumers are misled, the rules should bite.
But there is a difference between a service that misleads its users and one that simply helps them find things. A recommendation on a niche platform is not a manipulation; it is the product. It is how a curator says, quietly, "if this moved you, try this." Strip that away, or bury it under compliance designed for someone else's risks, and you do not protect the viewer. You impoverish the experience.
Many specialised services reach viewers through third-party platforms, and so do not control the signup flow, cancellation, billing, or recommendations -- the platform does.
Europe already understands this. When it wrote the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, it didn’t pretend a gatekeeper guiding billions of users was the same as a small operator serving a devoted few. It tiered the obligations to match power and reach. That was not a loophole. It was the whole intelligence of the design.
The Digital Fairness Act should inherit that intelligence. It should be guided by a principle the EU already knows well: proportionality. The biggest risks deserve the greatest scrutiny. A platform that harvests vast data and shapes the choices of an entire continent is not interchangeable with a service speaking to a community of enthusiasts. A law that treats them as identical won’t be fairer. It will just be blunter.
And media services are not an unregulated frontier; they already live under dense rules on advertising, transparency, protecting minors, and consumer rights. New legislation should focus on genuine gaps, not just pile on more rules.
The cost of getting this wrong doesn't fall where you might think. A billion-user platform with its budget, engineers, and lawyers, can absorb almost any compliance burden; the specialised service cannot. Rules that are too broad don’t chasten the giants. They quietly squeeze the small and the distinctive—and with them, the diversity of what Europeans can actually watch.
That is the irony worth sitting with. A law written in the name of the consumer could end up shrinking the very choices that consumer values most.
Real fairness was never about treating unequal things identically. It’s about matching the rules to the risk, protecting people where the danger is real, and leaving room for everything that makes Europe's digital culture worth defending. The Digital Fairness Act can do both. But it must remember the difference between a trap and a recommendation.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Beyond Mainstream. Streaming Media Global accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]