By Dr. Wan Khatina Nawawi
Dark patterns are not just bad design. They are strategic tools that erode consumer autonomy and distort market competition.
Not all design is neutral. Some are crafted to confuse, pressure or trap users. These are known as dark patterns. They influence users to take actions they may not have intended or fully understood. From guilt-based prompts to obstructive cancellation processes, these patterns compromise not only individual autonomy but also the competitive integrity of markets.
Although the term originated in the digital world, the practice itself is not new. Offline markets have long used similar strategies, from printed forms to scripted calls. What digital platforms have done is to scale and automate these tactics. With access to real-time data and behavioural testing, manipulation has become more efficient, more personalised and harder for consumers to detect.
Addressing dark patterns is not about restricting innovation but about ensuring that innovation respects consumer agency and supports healthy competition.
This article explores how dark patterns affect both consumers and markets. It draws on emerging regulatory models and behavioural insights and considers the role of both regulators and businesses in addressing the risks while maintaining room for innovation.
Exploiting the consumer: Wearing users down through manipulation
Dark patterns exploit behavioural biases, limited attention, and decision fatigue. They appear in many forms, but all are designed to nudge users towards outcomes that serve the interests of the business, often at the expense of the user. Among the most common are nagging, obstruction, and forced action.
Nagging involves the repeated prompting of users to complete a task or change a setting, even after they have declined. These prompts interrupt user journeys and rely on fatigue rather than persuasion. Obstruction occurs when cancelling a service or opting out is made unnecessarily difficult. This might involve hiding the relevant buttons, introducing multiple confirmation steps or requiring direct contact despite a digital sign-up process. Forced action refers to cases where users are made to perform unrelated tasks, such as creating an account or accepting marketing terms, before they can access a product or service.
These patterns are not aimed at a single act of deception. Instead, they wear down resistance over time, leading users to make choices out of frustration rather than genuine consent. The 2022 OECD Digital Paper on Dark Commercial Patterns highlights how such strategies create autonomy harm, especially for vulnerable users, who may not have the digital fluency, confidence or time to navigate complex interfaces. Users may also suffer financial loss, left frustrated, or unintentionally share their personal data.
Consumer protection: Clarifying standards and modernising enforcement
Most consumer protection frameworks prohibit misleading or deceptive conduct. However, many do not address interface-based manipulation, which often operates through form, placement and timing rather than false information. As design becomes a key tool of influence, regulators are recognising the need for clearer legal standards and stronger enforcement capabilities.
Recent developments in the EU, UK and ASEAN offer insights into how consumer frameworks are evolving to address interface-based manipulation, often referred to as dark patterns.
The EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive has long prohibited misleading actions and omissions, but its application to interface design was clarified in May 2022. The updated guidance confirmed that practices such as disguised advertising, false urgency messages and design structures that obstruct comparison may already fall within the directive’s scope.
In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 strengthens consumer protection by directly targeting design practices commonly associated with dark patterns. The Act prohibits tactics such as drip pricing and obstructive subscription cancellation flows, recognising that these interface strategies can undermine consumer autonomy and distort decision-making, especially when firms are not aware of how design decisions can exploit behavioural biases. It also enables the UK Competition and Markets Authority (UK CMA) to take direct enforcement action against firms that deploy such practices, without needing to go through the courts.
Meanwhile, ASEAN has also recognised the consumer-related effects of dark patterns in its 2022 Guidelines on Consumer Protection in E-Commerce. These non-binding guidelines recommend that ASEAN Member States address risks arising from deceptive design, manipulative choice architecture and algorithmic decision-making. They promote the principle of “fairness by design” and encourage user-friendly and transparent interface standards, especially in the regulation of online platforms.
Together, these efforts reflect three key regulatory shifts. First, a move from reactive enforcement toward anticipatory regulation. Second, the recognition that design can function as a form of manipulation requiring both broad standards and targeted bans. Third, a growing consensus that user interfaces deserve scrutiny when they materially shape consumer outcomes.
For ASEAN, the path forward lies not in transplanting overseas laws wholesale but in gradually expanding the scope of existing consumer law to reflect emerging risks, supported by regional guidance and shared learning.
Competition implications: Design as a barrier to market entry
While the consumer protection risks of dark patterns have received growing attention, their competition implications remain underexplored in many jurisdictions. Yet the same strategies that manipulate or pressure individual users can also alter the structure and dynamics of digital markets. Manipulative interface design can distort how consumers behave in ways that reduce rivalry, entrench powerful firms and undermine more ethical or innovative competitors.
These design strategies not only influence individual decisions but also shape markets. Obstructive user flows, such as hiding cancellation buttons or requiring multiple confirmation steps, can raise switching costs without any improvement in quality or service. These frictions are not technical limitations. They are deliberate tactics designed to reduce churn and lock in users. While not a competition case, the UK CMA’s 2024 investigation into Emma Sleep highlights how interface-based pressure tactics can steer consumer choices at scale. The company was found to use false urgency messages, including countdown timers and misleading stock claims, push users to buy quickly. While handled as a consumer case, the UK CMA noted its broader market impact by distorting the way consumers evaluate alternatives and make comparisons.
Dark patterns also distort how users make choices within platforms. When firms use visual techniques such as large colourful accept buttons next to greyed out decline options, or display false urgency messages, they create a biased environment. Users may end up selecting the most visible or easy-to-click option, rather than the best one. On digital platforms, this can amount to a form of self-preferencing. For instance, the UK CMA investigated Amazon’s use of its Buy Box, where the platform appeared to favour certain sellers through default presentation. The result was that alternative sellers, even if competitive, were effectively hidden from view. These are not neutral designs. They are business strategies embedded in interface architecture.
As part of legitimate optimisation efforts, dominant platforms benefit from ongoing access to user data, which they use to test and refine how their interfaces influence behaviour. In A/B testing, different versions of a design are shown to different users to see which one drives more engagement or spending. These designs are then scaled across the platform, leaving smaller firms unable to compete on equal terms. The result is a market shaped less by product quality and more by how effectively firms can influence user behaviour.
Expanding the lens of competition harm
Traditional competition law has focused on prices, output and innovation. Dark patterns challenge this approach because the harm they cause is often indirect and behavioural. A user may choose a higher priced or lower quality product not because of exclusion or collusion, but because of the way the options were presented. These effects may not be visible in price trends or consumer complaints, but they can reduce competition by steering demand away from better options and by reducing the pressure on dominant firms to improve.
This creates new challenges for competition authorities. To identify and assess harm, they may need to adopt tools that are more common in behavioural research, such as journey mapping, interface audits and consumer testing. These methods can reveal how design choices affect switching, discovery and decision quality. Some jurisdictions have started using these techniques in market studies, but they are not yet part of standard competition enforcement. In the ASEAN region, there is limited recognition that interface manipulation can be a form of non-price exclusion. Design features are rarely examined in merger reviews or abuse of dominance cases, even where user retention or visibility is central to market power.
A more modern competition policy would acknowledge that market outcomes depend not only on who can enter or lower prices, but also on how consumers are guided to make choices. If firms compete by manipulating those choices, then design must fall within the scope of competition scrutiny. This does not mean that all persuasive design is unlawful. But it does mean that competition authorities should be alert when design becomes a tool to entrench power, distort visibility or suppress switching.
A coordinated response to manipulative design
As digital markets become more complex and user journeys increasingly shaped by invisible architecture, the need for a more integrated regulatory approach becomes clear. The same design element can create risks that cut across legal domains. A pre ticked consent box might raise privacy issues, while also misleading consumers and undermining fair competition. These harms do not sit neatly within one regulatory silo.
These concerns have begun to influence regulatory responses. The EU Digital Markets Act 2022 prohibits designated gatekeepers from designing interfaces that unfairly influence user decisions. For example, gatekeepers are required to obtain users’ consent for data sharing across services in a way that is clear and free from manipulation. This includes avoiding interface designs that steer users toward acceptance through visual bias, repeated prompts or confusing options.
In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 introduces a new competition regime for large digital firms. It gives the UK CMA powers to impose conduct requirements on firms with Strategic Market Status, defined as firms with substantial and entrenched market power and a strategic position. These requirements are intended to reduce friction, promote user choice and prevent behaviour that undermines fair competition, including through interface design.
Dark patterns are not just about unethical design. They are part of a wider shift in how market power is built and maintained. If we want competition policy to remain relevant in digital environments, it must take these patterns seriously. Recognising choice architecture as a source of harm is the first step. Regulating it will require a coordinated legal response. For businesses, clearer design standards can also reduce reputational risk and build long-term consumer trust. Ethical design is not anti-growth. It can become a differentiator in increasingly crowded digital markets.