Germany's two largest press associations have identified a specific gap in the government's latest antitrust reform, and it's worth taking seriously even for readers skeptical of expansive platform regulation.
On July 16, 2026, the BDZV (Bundesverband Digitalpublisher und Zeitungsverleger) and MVFP (Medienverband der freien Presse) issued a joint statement calling the government's draft 12th GWB-Novelle — the latest amendment to Germany's Act Against Restraints of Competition — "a first, but by no means sufficient step" toward securing press diversity in the digital age. Their core complaint: the draft contains no meaningful changes to Section 19a GWB, the provision that governs how Germany's Bundeskartellamt polices companies with "überragende marktübergreifende Bedeutung" — paramount cross-market significance.
What the Draft Actually Does
The publishers aren't reflexively hostile to the bill. They explicitly welcome three changes: higher merger-control turnover thresholds under Section 35 GWB, permanent (rather than time-limited) authorization for publisher cooperation agreements under Section 30(2b), and modified restructuring-merger rules under Section 36 that now cover publishers of all sizes, including joint ventures. Legal analysis of the June 4, 2026 Referentenentwurf from the law firm Noerr confirms the scale of the merger-threshold change: the worldwide turnover trigger rises from €500 million to €750 million, a 50% increase, alongside proportional increases to the domestic thresholds — a shift projected to remove roughly 120 mergers a year from Bundeskartellamt review.
That's a defensible deregulatory move. Raising a threshold set years ago to account for inflation and market growth, and freeing the authority to focus on transactions that actually risk competition, is the kind of proportionate housekeeping this publication generally favors. The government's stated aim — a "faster, leaner and more effective" competition law — is not wrong on its face.
The Gap Publishers Are Pointing To
What's missing is narrower and more specific than a generic complaint about Big Tech. BDZV and MVFP list four concrete asks that didn't make the draft: an ex-lege effect for Bundeskartellamt prohibition orders (so violations are automatically unlawful rather than requiring fresh litigation to establish), a reversal of the burden of proof in gatekeeper abuse cases, effective mechanisms for private enforcement, and a binding dispute-resolution process. Noerr's independent review of the same draft reaches the identical conclusion from a different angle: "there are no genuinely material changes to Section 19a GWB" — only a dropped reporting requirement and a fee increase to €750,000.
Section 19a has a real track record worth examining before dismissing the publishers' concern as rent-seeking. Since the provision took effect in January 2021, the Bundeskartellamt has designated Alphabet/Google (January 5, 2022, citing over 80% market share in general search), Meta (May 4, 2022, citing its 3.5 billion global users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) and Amazon (July 6, 2022, citing over 70% of German marketplace commission revenue) as gatekeepers subject to five-year terms of enhanced abuse supervision. The clearest publisher-relevant result came in December 2022, when a Bundeskartellamt Section 19a proceeding forced Google to abandon plans to fold its News Showcase product into core Search results, decouple Showcase participation from search ranking, and stop obstructing publishers' ability to license their press rights separately through collecting societies.
That case is precisely the steelman for the publishers' position: Section 19a worked, but only because the Bundeskartellamt itself opened and drove a multi-year investigation. No individual publisher had a fast, direct route to relief. A regional paper being quietly deprioritized in a platform's referral algorithm today has no equivalent lever — it must wait for the authority's own initiative and resources, which are finite.
A Proportionate Fix, Not a Blank Check
The honest case against the publishers' full wish list is that burden-of-proof reversals and broad private enforcement rights can be abused — turned into litigation weapons by competitors with no real public-interest grievance, or used to relitigate settled market findings. Regulators and legislators are right to be cautious about handing every aggrieved market participant an automatic cause of action against a designated gatekeeper.
But the Google News Showcase case is itself the evidence that a narrower version of the publishers' ask is proportionate, not radical: a faster interim-relief track and a limited private right of action confined to the specific abuses — self-preferencing, data leverage, access denial — that Section 19a was written to address in 2021, precisely because the current model already proved those abuses exist and are remediable. That's different from a general expansion of antitrust liability; it's closing an enforcement-speed gap in a tool the Bundeskartellamt itself has used successfully three times against the same handful of companies.
The 12th GWB-Novelle is now headed into Bundestag and Bundesrat proceedings, where BDZV and MVFP have explicitly asked lawmakers to amend it. Given that the draft otherwise embodies a reasonable deregulatory instinct on merger thresholds, adding a targeted, evidence-based Section 19a fix — not the maximalist version, but enough to shorten the multi-year lag between an abuse and a remedy — would make this a more coherent reform rather than a missed opportunity.