A Long-Overdue Administrative Overhaul — With One Conspicuous Omission
On June 4, 2026, Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs (BMWE) published the draft 12th Amendment to the Gesetz gegen Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen (GWB), Germany's competition statute. The draft runs across a broad range of procedural modernisations: merger notification thresholds raised for the first time since 1990, a new power for the Bundeskartellamt to screen public procurement data without prior suspicion, a first-ever eight-year term limit for the FCO president, and administrative fees lifted off their 1989 floor. Most visibly for Big Tech, the fee ceiling for Section 19a proceedings — the provision granting the FCO power to designate companies of "paramount significance for competition across markets" — jumps thirtyfold, from €25,000 to €750,000.
That fee hike is also precisely where the substantive reform ends. The draft introduces no new designated company categories, no expanded list of prohibited practices, and no fresh statutory guidance on how Section 19a should coordinate with the EU's Digital Markets Act. For a provision that has become the centrepiece of German tech regulation, the 12th amendment is notably, conspicuously silent.
What Section 19a Has Already Achieved
To appreciate the significance of that silence, recall what Section 19a has delivered since its introduction in January 2021 as part of the GWB Digitisation Act (10th amendment). The provision created a two-step enforcement architecture: first, the Bundeskartellamt designates a company as having "paramount significance for competition across markets" — a five-year designation — and second, it can prohibit specific abusive practices within that company's ecosystems: self-preferencing, data tying, denial of interoperability, leveraging data access, and more. Critically, the FCO can act without proving market dominance in any specific product market.
In five years, the instrument has moved at speed that surprised even its drafters. All five of the world's largest tech platforms — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft — carry active Section 19a designations. The Federal Court of Justice confirmed Amazon's designation in August 2024 and Apple's in March 2025, after both companies challenged the FCO's assessment. Microsoft's designation, issued in September 2024 and explicitly citing its OpenAI investment and cloud-AI integration, is the most recent.
The enforcement record is substantive. Google committed in April 2025 to unbundle Google Automotive Services and remove exclusivity provisions from its Maps Platform, after the FCO found potential violations in automotive infotainment — a market entirely outside the DMA's core platform services catalogue. Meta's years-long data-combination proceeding concluded in October 2024 after the company restructured its Accounts Centre. And in February 2026, the FCO issued a prohibition order against Amazon's algorithmic price-control mechanisms on its German marketplace, ordering disgorgement of approximately €59 million in economic benefits — the first-ever disgorgement order under the GWB's 2023 reforms, with the FCO noting the amount is partial and the violation ongoing.
The Case for Leaving Well Enough Alone
There is a serious argument that substantive stability in Section 19a is the right approach. The BMWE's own January 2026 four-year evaluation concluded that Section 19a had "fully achieved its legislative objectives." Five designations confirmed by the highest German courts, a rich set of binding commitments from Alphabet, Apple, and Meta, and a precedent-setting disgorgement order against Amazon constitute a genuine track record. Under that reading, legislating further risks disrupting an instrument that has already produced binding Federal Court doctrine — a high bar for intervention.
Proponents of restraint would add that the DMA is itself now in active enforcement by the European Commission against the same five companies. Deepening Section 19a's reach while DMA enforcement is still developing risks layering incompatible national and EU requirements onto identical conduct — exactly the kind of regulatory fragmentation that creates compliance drag without proportionate benefit.
What the Coalition Promised, and What the Draft Omits
The problem is that the current CDU/CSU-SPD coalition explicitly committed to "further developing" digital competition rules. That language generated specific policy expectations: clearer statutory guidance on the DMA interface, possible expansion of the prohibited practices list to address AI-era conduct, and a workable framework for allocating proceedings between Berlin and Brussels.
None of that appears in the 12th amendment draft. The interface between Section 19a GWB and the DMA — both simultaneously applicable to the same five companies — remains legally unchanged. DMA Article 1(6) permits national competition law to operate alongside EU obligations, and the Federal Court's Amazon ruling confirmed Section 19a is "admissible alongside the DMA." But confirmed admissibility is not a coordination framework. It specifies nothing about how the FCO and the Commission should sequence proceedings on overlapping conduct, who leads on AI practices both regimes could address, or how commitments made to Brussels should affect cases in Bonn.
Microsoft's Section 19a designation explicitly cites its OpenAI partnership and AI model integration. Apple's ongoing proceedings concern its App Tracking Transparency framework — a subject the European Commission is separately examining under DMA gatekeeper obligations for iOS. The risk of parallel, potentially conflicting investigations into the same conduct by two jurisdictions is real. The 12th amendment draft does nothing to reduce it.
The Fee Hike: Real but Narrow
The thirtyfold increase in Section 19a fee ceilings — from €25,000 to €750,000 — is genuine reform, but of a procedural kind. Fee ceilings had not been updated since 1989; the old limits made cost recovery from complex, multi-year platform investigations structurally untenable. Applying 1989-era administrative fee caps to proceedings that routinely run five years and generate thousands of pages of econometric analysis was indefensible.
But no one at Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, or Microsoft is losing sleep over a €750,000 fee ceiling. The Section 19a disgorgement power — permitting the FCO to claw back the full economic benefit of a violation, as demonstrated by the €59 million Amazon order — already provides the deterrent leverage that matters. The fee hike restores basic proportionality to cost recovery; it is not a signal of intensified enforcement ambition.
An Instrument That Will Soon Need an Upgrade
Germany's Section 19a experiment has been, by most measures, a genuine innovation in competition law — one influential enough that the DMA's architects borrowed its concept of pre-designation without waiting for proven harm in a defined market. The FCO's enforcement record in five years is arguably more concrete than what the Commission has yet achieved under the DMA.
The 12th amendment's silence on Section 19a's substantive scope may be strategic: consolidate the case law, let the pending Apple ATTF market test and the Microsoft AI investigation mature before legislating. That is a defensible position. But the emergence of AI conduct that sits simultaneously within DMA and national competition law — and the coalition's own stated commitment to further development — suggests the instrument will need a substantive upgrade before the current five-year designations expire. The 12th amendment defers that work rather than delivering it.