The KFTC joins the CMA in the UK in attempting to enforce prohibitions on dark patterns that often require a close inspection of the context
The KFTC is consulting on guidance for businesses facing new regulation under the E-Commerce Act
On 29 August 2025, the South Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) opened a consultation on guidance for implementing amendments to the Act on Consumer Protection in E-Commerce (E-Commerce Act). The E-Commerce Act was amended in January 2024, with its updated provisions coming into force in February 2025. The amendments aimed to strengthen the act to better protect consumers from ‘dark patterns’ and other emerging unfair business practices increasingly carried out online. Under the E-Commerce Act, the KFTC is empowered to enforce provisions on prohibited conduct through corrective measures and fines of up to KRW5m (£2,600) per violation. The regulator’s proposed guidance is directed to businesses and seeks not only to clarify the practices that are explicitly prohibited under the law, but to also develop further understanding on practices that may be non-compliant in certain circumstances. The consultation will remain open for stakeholder feedback under 18 September 2025.
The KFTC’s guidance offers businesses a series of more nuanced examples on how dark patterns may be harming consumers
The E-Commerce Act names and outlaws six specific types of dark patterns, also referred to as online choice architecture:
Hidden renewals: Increasing charges or transitioning from a free to paid subscription period with consumer consent;
Sequential public pricing: Displaying only a portion of the total cost of a good or service during a transactional journey (also referred to as drip pricing);
Preselection of options: Presetting a selection advantageous to the trader when offering consumers a choice of options;
Incorrect hierarchy: Favouring selections advantageous to the trader through size, shape, colour or other presentation elements on a page;
Interference with a cancellation: Making the process to cancel or withdraw from a subscription unnecessarily difficult; and
Repeated interference: Pushing consumers’ to change their selections through pop-up windows or other interruptions.
The regulator's guidance offers a series of specific examples of how these non-compliant practices may be presented in transactions and provides commentary on circumstances in which a trader’s permitted conduct may become non-compliant. Regarding hidden renewals, the KFTC clarified that it does not consider instances where consumers consent expressly to a time-limited discount offer at the time of signing a contract or instances where the price of the goods or service has risen independently of subscription terms to be a violation of the law. The regulator recommends that businesses that are unable to verify consumer consent for a change in charges should avoid violating the law by cancelling regular payments or maintaining the previously agreed upon fees until consent can be confirmed. On drip pricing, the regulator specified that it considers the “total cost” of a good to include all non-optional fees, such as cleaning fees or services charges, but does not require the inclusion of optional fees or charges in the advertised price. To comply with rules regarding cancellations, the KFTC also states that consumers must be provided with the option to cancel through the same means (i.e. the same website or phone number) they used to begin a subscription.
South Korea is only one of several jurisdictions seeking to improve digital consumer protection in rapidly evolving markets
The KFTC’s focus on digital consumer protection aligns with a growing global concern about how consumers may be targeted with unfair practices through digital transactions. Both the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Act and the pending Digital Fairness Act (DFA) in the EU take aim at some or all of the same dark patterns prohibited under the E-Commerce Act in South Korea. Service and subscription cancellation has also been a focus of policymakers and regulators in Australia, Germany and the US in recent years. However, the nuances of certain industries have complicated the supposed simplicity of so-called “click-to-cancel” rules. Through comments to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), telecoms industry associations contended that proposed cancellation rules would increase the likelihood that consumers unknowingly cancel services that may be part of a bundle. Similarly, in the UK, the flexibility afforded to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in identifying and enforcing against the use of dark patterns online demonstrates the importance of the specific context in which some otherwise benign commercial practices can become harmful to specific groups of consumers. As legislation such as the DFA advances and as commercial practices continue to evolve quickly, the effort and related resourcing required of regulators to enforce new laws in these complicated contexts will only continue to grow.
