La reforma de la Ley de Competencia Desleal de 2021una reforma menor, coyuntural y continuista del tratamiento de las prácticas comerciales desleales con consumidores

Résumé

The Unfair Competition Law has been recently amended by the Royal Decree Law 24/201 to implement the EU directive on B2C commercial practices as amended in 2019 by the EU Directive 2019/2161. Consequently, a no negligible number of provisions of the Unfair Competition Law have been modified. However, taken as a whole, these many changes have had a modest systematic and substantive impact. Firstly, the amended provisions of the Law are consistent with the relevant provisions of the Directive, and no material differences with potentially serious divergences can be identified. Second, the Royal Decree Law has maintained the 2009 option to include the substantive conduct provisions of the Directive in the Unfair Competition Law, whereas the specific obligations to be observed in B2C commercial practices as well as the public law sanctions have been consistently introduced in the Consumers Protection Law. Lastly, the reform concerns B2C practices that, taken individually, can hardly be considered significantly important, but negatively affect the economic interests of many consumers and therefore may bring mistrust not only in the efficacy of the EU consumers’ protection system and even on commercial communications, rising information and transaction costs.