Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) published the Referentenentwurf for the 12th amendment to the Act Against Restraints of Competition (GWB) on June 4, 2026, opening a consultation window that closed June 19. The draft is substantial on paper — it raises merger-control turnover thresholds by roughly 50%, expands transaction-value screening to catch not-yet-active startups, and hands the Bundeskartellamt new authority under a proposed §32h to mine public-procurement data for bid-rigging. What it does not do is touch the substance of Section 19a, Germany's bespoke tool for policing "paramount significance for competition across markets" among the largest digital platforms.
What Actually Changed
Section 19a gets three adjustments, all peripheral. The administrative fine ceiling for §19a proceedings rises to €750,000 — a figure last set in 1989 and now clearly out of step with the scale of the companies it targets. A reporting obligation that had already run its course is struck from the statute. And a publication duty is clarified. As one detailed practitioner overview of the draft put it, the practically significant interface between §19a and the EU's Digital Markets Act "remains unchanged" — leaving, in the firms' assessment, the legal framework "essentially unchanged" for any company operating under both regimes.
That matters because §19a is not a dormant provision. The Bundeskartellamt has used it to designate five companies — Alphabet/Google (January 2022), Meta (May 2022), Amazon (July 2022, upheld by the Federal Court of Justice), Apple (April 2023, also upheld), and Microsoft (September 2024) — as holding paramount cross-market significance, unlocking a broader abuse-control regime than ordinary German competition law allows. Enforcement has followed: a June 2023 statement of objections against Google's Automotive Services and Maps bundling, a concluded Meta proceeding in October 2024, ongoing scrutiny of Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework raised in February 2025, and — most consequentially — a February 2026 order barring Amazon from controlling third-party seller prices on its German marketplace, paired with a roughly €59 million disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, the authority's first use of that remedy under §19a.
The Case for Leaving It Alone
There is a real argument for restraint here, and it deserves a fair hearing before dismissal. The EU's Digital Markets Act, fully applicable since May 2023, gives the European Commission exclusive enforcement authority over designated "gatekeepers" using quantitative thresholds — and all five §19a-designated firms are also DMA gatekeepers. The Bundeskartellamt and the Commission have coordinated to avoid duplicative investigations, and the German Federal Court of Justice has already worked through one live coexistence question: in the Amazon case, it held that commitments a company makes to the Commission under the DMA do not automatically foreclose a separate FCO declaratory decision under §19a. Courts, not legislators, are the ones actually stress-testing how these two regimes interact in practice. Rewriting §19a's substance mid-way through that judicial process — before Karlsruhe and Luxembourg have finished sorting out where DMA primacy ends and national law begins — risks legislating a fix for a problem that hasn't been fully diagnosed. A ministry juggling a genuinely large reform agenda (merger thresholds, procurement screening, energy-sector oversight) choosing to wait on the one area where courts are already doing useful work is not obviously wrong.
Why That Restraint Still Falls Short
But "wait for the courts" is a different choice than "raise the stakes while waiting," and that is what this draft does. Tripling-plus the §19a fine ceiling to €750,000 increases the financial consequence of exactly the jurisdictional ambiguity the coalition agreement — which pledged to develop German digital competition law further — was supposed to resolve. Section 19a's prohibited-practices list is drafted as a non-exhaustive set of examples (Regelbeispiele) rather than the DMA's closed catalog of obligations, meaning German enforcers retain interpretive discretion the EU regime deliberately withholds from national authorities for gatekeeper conduct. Layering that discretion, now with higher penalties attached, on top of a DMA framework that already covers the same five companies for much of the same conduct — self-preferencing, data leverage, interoperability — does not obviously produce better competition outcomes. It produces two regulators applying two different legal tests to the same behavior, with the BGH's Amazon ruling confirming that a DMA commitment does not buy a company certainty against a parallel German finding.
For challengers and smaller platforms trying to plan around either regime, that ambiguity is a real cost — arguably a larger one than for the five incumbents who can absorb dual-track legal exposure as a cost of doing business in Germany's second-largest online market. A ministry serious about "faster, leaner, more effective" competition law, the draft's own stated goal, would have used this vehicle to write a coordination clause — something like the DMA's own Article 1(6) contemplates for member-state law — rather than raise the price of an interface question it left for the courts to keep litigating one case at a time.
Key Takeaways
- The fee increase and procedural streamlining are legitimate, overdue modernization — but they are not a substitute for resolving how §19a and the DMA divide enforcement authority over the same five companies.
- Leaving §19a's open-ended "Regelbeispiele" structure untouched while raising penalties increases compliance uncertainty precisely where predictability matters most for scale-ups navigating two overlapping regimes.
- The German Federal Court of Justice, not the Bundeswirtschaftsministerium, is currently doing the substantive work of defining §19a-DMA coexistence — a legislative fix, if one comes, is now overdue rather than premature.