What if the next time you doom-scrolled through Instagram, X or TikTok, you reached an end point? It’s hard to imagine. The so-called infinite scroll has become such a fixture of social media that our dopamine receptors have come to expect it, even though it’s a time suck that undermines our mental health and serves no real purpose other than to keep us glued to an app for as long as possible.

A new law being drafted by the European Commission is designed to turn this and other similar engagement hacks off by default, targeting some of the psychological tricks that tech firms have long borrowed from the gambling world.

The Digital Fairness Act (DFA) aims to tackle notification designs harnessing variable rewards, a tactic that dispenses a stimulus inconsistently, like the whirring dials of a slot machine, to keep you checking your phone. Internal research from Meta Platforms Inc. shows that batching notifications about likes and comments in a cluster gets stronger engagement than pinging them individually in real time. And the law will target autoplay, when a video on YouTube starts before you’ve decided to watch it.

The forthcoming act, tabled by Commissioner Michael McGrath, addresses the ways tech firms manipulate consumer behavior. It targets subscription traps and dark patterns — deceptive design tricks like pre-selecting a check box or sneaking an insurance policy into your shopping cart — and, critically, forces tech firms to turn off addictive design by default. If Instagram users want their endless newsfeed back, they’ll have to go into their settings to turn it on. The act is scheduled for publication in late 2026; its rules will theoretically come into force sometime between 2028 and 2030.

The proposals might sound unrealistic given these features are the emotional engine of social media firms and critical to their profitability. But Meta might not need an endless scroll to succeed. Some users have spotted Facebook’s short-form video feature, Reels, quietly experimenting with limits to the videos you can swipe through on a newsfeed. And Slack, the workplace messaging platform owned by Salesforce Inc., already has a template for killing the endless scroll: It tells app users who thumb through all their notifications, “You’re all caught up!” leaving them no further content to scratch their dopamine itch.

Europe has a short but critical window of opportunity to push through the new rules, following a Los Angeles jury verdict in March that found Meta and Alphabet Inc.’s Google liable for the addictive design of their platforms, while a raft of countries like Australia, Greece, the UK, Austria, Spain, Denmark, Poland and France have either enacted or are considering social-media bans for kids.

The momentum is global and crosses courts, governments and the public; nearly half of American teens believe social media has a mostly negative effect on their peers, according to the Pew Research Center.

But there’s a risk the Commission will fumble. It has shifted to a de-regulation agenda under Ursula von der Leyen, who’s made “competitiveness” her signature issue, and tech companies have capitalized on those vibes to frame the DFA as an antithesis to growth.(1) That’s hogwash, of course. The biggest drag on European innovation and tech is a lack of domestic funding, not regulation, and the new rules are more likely to hurt tech leviathans whose size and network effects contribute to their addictive quality.

Tech lobbyists argue otherwise, and vehemently. Commission officials have held nearly 100 meetings with various organizations about the DFA since December 2024, roughly 83% of them with tech industry representatives, according to the Corporate Europe Observatory, a nonprofit research and campaign group. “The industry seems to be aiming at getting the DFA completely off the table,” says Bram Vranken, a researcher at the Observatory, noting that the bloc already proposed watering down its AI Act and General Data Protection Regulation last November.

“But the court cases have also given a push to be more ambitious than the Commission was planning to be,” Vranken adds. “It’s difficult to predict because this can go either way.” One plausible outcome: The act gets diluted so it only applies to children. That would only win half the battle, since everyone is affected by addictive design patterns, and the DFA represents a surgical approach that complements the blunt instrument of blanket bans.

When I asked McGrath’s spokesperson about the lobbying risk, they said the Commissioner would table an “ambitious proposal” when the law is published. McGrath, who was scheduled to travel to San Francisco last week, faces an uphill battle. His law could lead to the kind of sweeping rules that helped break the stranglehold of Big Tobacco in the 1990s, which followed a combination of litigation, regulation and public opinion.

Social media is facing a similar tipping point. The LA jury trial focused entirely on design decisions like auto-play, infinite scroll and recommendation algorithms that send users down rabbit holes, establishing that those features were deliberate and known to cause harm. It’s a landmark decision, providing a moral and legal foundation on which the DFA can make its case.

As he gets pummeled with demands to water down his proposals over the course of this year, let’s hope McGrath holds the line.

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(1) Lobbyists also argue that the DFA duplicates key aspects of the Digital Services Act (DSA) which also covers manipulative and addictive software design. But enforcement of that law is painfully slow and arguably ineffective, requiring claimants to prove manipulation in court, which can take years. In the case of TikTok for instance, the Commission has opened four separate DSA investigations since 2024, yet the addictive features that prompted the first investigation are still in place. The DFA’s approach is potentially clearer, prohibiting addictive design upfront rather than requiring years of litigation.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

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