Is the ‘New Deal’ for consumers a big deal? Consumer protection and online marketplaces

In 2018, The Commission adopted Communication COM/2018/183 final, titled ‘New Deal for Consumers’. The overall goal was to modernize existing consumer protection legislation to meet new challenges caused by e.g., digitalization. Some of these challenges concern online marketplaces. This article qualifies the roles and functions of the online marketplaces and analyses and discusses the new initiatives regarding online marketplaces in light of the roles of the marketplaces, the existing legal framework and the legal paradigm of consumer protection. It is found that the new rules do not challenge the current paradigm. They do, however, regulate the online marketplaces within general private consumer (contract) law which is a (small) step towards acknowledging the need to regulate the online marketplaces in their role as intermediaries of the main contract. The author suggests that this small step could be made bigger by perceiving the marketplace’s business model as more than three separate contracts, and rather as an interrelationship where risk allocation is essential.