Contrarre da minore nell’era digitale. Aporie, modelli e prospettive tra Europa continentale e Cina

This article examines the contractual capacity of minors in online environments through a comparative analysis of European continental law and Chinese law. It argues that traditional civil law remedies – particularly the ex post annulment of contracts concluded by minors – are structurally inadequate to govern the speed and dematerialisation of digital transactions. In the European framework, the protection gap is largely filled by platform-driven self-regulation (Terms of Service, parental controls), which effectively shifts the burden of oversight onto parents. Chinese law, by contrast, deploys a pervasive ex ante regulatory apparatus rooted in a paternalistic conception of the State’s role, combining strict time and spending limits with real-name identification systems. Drawing on the common law doctrine of piercing the corporate veil as a functional analogy, the article proposes a reconceptualisation of the digital account as a “veil” that dissociates the formal account holder from the actual user, thereby raising fundamental questions of imputation and liability allocation. The analysis concludes by advocating for a co-regulatory model that distributes responsibility among platforms, parents, and public institutions, grounded in objective and verifiable criteria of digital consumption rather than formal declarations of age.