The Bundeskartellamt used its annual report for 2025/26, presented by President Andreas Mundt on June 30, 2026, to showcase the most concrete result yet from Germany's four-year-old digital-gatekeeper regime: a roughly €59 million order forcing Amazon to disgorge profits from unlawful price-control mechanisms on its German Marketplace, alongside a still-unresolved probe into Apple's App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATTF). Together the two cases are the clearest test to date of whether Section 19a of the Act Against Restraints on Competition (GWB) can move faster and cut deeper than either traditional antitrust or Brussels' Digital Markets Act.
What the Amazon order actually does
On February 5, 2026, the Bundeskartellamt prohibited Amazon from continuing to run the price-control mechanisms it had used on Marketplace: an internal system that removed or hid third-party sellers' listings — including from the high-visibility "Buy Box" — whenever Amazon judged their prices too high, based on criteria the authority found opaque even to sellers themselves (LTO). Alongside the prohibition, the authority ordered Amazon to disgorge approximately €58.8–59 million in economic benefit gained from the conduct — the first time it has used the profit-disgorgement power added to Section 34 GWB in the 2023 reform, which lets the agency estimate illicit gains rather than prove them to the euro. Amazon has one month from the decision to appeal directly to the Bundesgerichtshof, Germany's Federal Court of Justice, which is exactly what it has done, per Mundt's June 30 report (Bundeskartellamt Annual Report 2025/26).
The steelman for Section 19a
There is a real case for a tool like this. Traditional German and EU abuse-control law requires the authority to first prove dominance in a precisely defined market, then prove concrete harm — a process that historically took years while the underlying practice kept running. Section 19a, in force since 2021, lets the Bundeskartellamt designate firms of "paramount significance for competition across markets" and then act against specific practices — self-preferencing, data leverage, interoperability blocks — without re-litigating market dominance each time, with appeals routed directly to the Bundesgerichtshof to compress the timeline. Five firms — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft — currently hold that designation. For sellers who spent years locked out of the Buy Box by rules Amazon never disclosed, a €59 million clawback is a tangible remedy that ordinary competition enforcement, with its multi-year proof burdens, likely would not have delivered this quickly.
Where the concern lies
The trade-off is that Section 19a inverts the normal evidentiary burden: once a firm is designated, it must prove its own conduct is objectively justified rather than the regulator proving harm. Combined with a five-firm list built almost entirely of large — mostly American — platforms, that structure risks becoming a standing compliance tax rather than a targeted remedy. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has argued the regime imposes "significant compliance costs and operational complexity" on designated firms and creates a "constant threat of proactive interventions" independent of demonstrated harm — and warns that constraining U.S. platforms specifically, without equivalent scrutiny of Chinese competitors entering the same markets, could shift competitive advantage rather than restore it (ITIF).
The Apple case illustrates the risk of open-ended proceedings. The Bundeskartellamt opened its ATTF investigation in June 2022, examining whether Apple's opt-in consent requirement for third-party trackers — while Apple's own apps face different constraints — improperly favors Apple's advertising business under both Section 19a(2) GWB and Article 102 TFEU. The authority sent Apple its preliminary legal assessment in February 2025 and, per the June 2026 annual report, is still coordinating with other European competition authorities rather than closing the case (Bundeskartellamt — Apple ATTF). Four years in, without a decision, is precisely the kind of protracted uncertainty Section 19a was supposed to avoid — and it cuts against Apple's stated privacy rationale for ATTF without yet showing that rationale is pretextual.
The proportionate read
The Amazon result is a genuine win for the enforcement-can-move-fast case: a specific, documented practice, a calculated remedy, and a court review process already underway rather than deferred indefinitely. That is proportionate regulation working as intended — narrowly targeted at demonstrated seller harm, with judicial review as the backstop rather than the endpoint. The Apple proceeding is the harder case. If Brussels and Berlin cannot converge on whether a privacy-protective default is also an antitrust violation after four years of investigation, that ambiguity itself is a cost — one German policymakers should weigh before extending Section 19a's reach further, and one the Bundesgerichtshof's Amazon review may partially clarify by testing how much deference the disgorgement estimate itself deserves.