Abstract

The paper examines ‘dark patterns’ in digital interfaces through the lens of Indian consumer law rather than competition law. It re-describes dark patterns as three underlying mechanisms of manufactured consent, draws on behavioural economics to explain their effectiveness, and proposes a five-factor ‘Vitiated Consent Test’ for identifying when persuasive design becomes an actionable unfair trade practice or misleading advertisement under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and the CCPA Guidelines, 2023. The test is applied to recent CCPA enforcement action against IndiGo and BookMyShow, and the paper closes with a comparative analysis against the United States and European Union frameworks, along with proposals for reform.

Keywords: Dark Patterns; Consumer Protection Act, 2019; Unfair Trade Practice; Misleading Advertisement; Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA); Manufactured Consent; Behavioural Economics; Vitiated Consent Test; Digital Markets; Comparative Consumer Law.

I. Introduction

A user in India who wants to unsubscribe from a food-delivery or OTT platform will typically encounter a screen that does not simply ask “cancel?”. It asks why they are leaving, offers a discount to stay, restates what they will lose, and only then, several taps later, lets them go. The same platform’s sign-up flow asks for none of this. This asymmetry is not a design accident; it is a deliberate allocation of friction, placed precisely where the platform’s revenue is at stake. Interface designers and regulators call this class of techniques ‘dark patterns’: a user interface deliberately designed to mislead or trick a user into an action they did not originally intend, by subverting or impairing their autonomy, decision-making or choice.[1]

Indian commentary on this problem has repeatedly reached for competition law, arguing that a dominant platform’s systematic use of dark patterns should be treated as an abuse of dominance under Section 4 of the Competition Act, 2002, since manufactured consent, deployed at scale, entrenches lock-in and forecloses rivals.[2] This essay resists that pull. Competition law’s remedies switch on only once a firm crosses the threshold of dominance or significant market power: a threshold that the great majority of platforms deploying dark patterns in India’s market, from regional quick-commerce apps to mid-sized OTT services, will never cross. A user coerced into a subscription trap by a firm with a five per cent market share suffers exactly the same injury to autonomy as one coerced by a firm with fifty. Treating the harm as primarily competitive therefore leaves most of it unaddressed, and reaches the remainder only indirectly, as a side-effect of protecting rivals rather than protecting the user.

This essay argues that Indian consumer law already supplies a more direct and more complete answer. Dark patterns are, first and last, an interference with a consumer’s ability to make an informed and autonomous choice, precisely the interest that the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (‘CPA’) and the Central Consumer Protection Authority’s (‘CCPA’) Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023 (‘the Guidelines’) exist to protect. Unlike competition law, this framework applies without proof of market power: any trader, of any size, who deploys a misleading advertisement, an unfair trade practice or an unfair contract term can be reached under Sections 2(28), 2(47) and 2(46) of the CPA respectively. The doctrinal task is therefore not to import a foreign vocabulary of dominance and foreclosure, but to sharpen the tools consumer law already has, and to convert the CCPA’s current practice of advisories and case-by-case notices into a durable, systemic enforcement architecture.

The essay makes this argument in six moves. It first re-describes dark patterns not as a list of thirteen named tricks but as three underlying mechanisms of manufactured consent. It then explains, through behavioural economics, why these mechanisms are effective against ordinary users. It develops the chain by which individually unremarkable instances of manipulation become a systemic trade practice, and proposes a five-factor Vitiated Consent Test (‘VCT’) for identifying when persuasive design crosses into an actionable unfair trade practice or misleading advertisement. It applies that test to enforcement action the CCPA has already taken, before situating India’s position comparatively against the United States and the European Union and closing with proposals for reform.

[1]Central Consumer Protection Authority, Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, cl 3(a) (Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Government of India, 30 November 2023) accessed 28 April 2026.

[2]See, eg, Ritisha Sinha and Arnav Srivastava, ‘Shady Play: How Tech Giants Use Dark Patterns to Distort Competition’ (NLIU Law Review Blog, 25 July 2024) accessed 28 April 2026.