A reform bill that reforms almost nothing about Big Tech
On June 4, 2026, Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) published the Referentenentwurf — the ministerial draft — for the 12th amendment to the Act Against Restraints of Competition (GWB), with formal publication following June 8 and a stakeholder consultation window that closed just fifteen days later, on June 19 (BMWE draft bill notice). The bill touches merger-control thresholds, adds a new bid-rigging screening tool for public procurement, and streamlines several administrative procedures. What it does not do, despite an explicit coalition-agreement pledge to further develop Germany's digital antitrust toolkit, is meaningfully touch Section 19a GWB — the provision that gave the Bundeskartellamt its power to police "undertakings of paramount significance for competition across markets" before conduct causes irreversible harm.
The changes to Section 19a in the draft amount to three items: deleting an expired reporting obligation under paragraph 4, clarifying a publication requirement, and raising the maximum administrative fee from a level unchanged since 1989 to €750,000 (Noerr, "12th Amendment to the German Competition Act"). The practically significant question — how Section 19a's national abuse-control regime interacts with the EU's Digital Markets Act, which already regulates many of the same gatekeepers — is left exactly as it was.
The case for going further
There's a real argument for more, not less. Section 19a was Germany's signature contribution to platform regulation, letting the Bundeskartellamt intervene against dominant firms' conduct — self-preferencing, data leverage, tying — without waiting years for a full abuse case to work through appeals. Since 2022 the authority has designated five companies under it: Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, Amazon, Apple and, as of September 30, 2024, Microsoft (Bundeskartellamt, proceedings against large digital corporations). Practitioners have flagged for years that the overlap between Section 19a and the DMA is genuinely unresolved — companies designated as "gatekeepers" under the DMA and simultaneously as having "paramount cross-market significance" under German law face two regulators with overlapping but not identical tests, without clear rules on which takes precedence or how remedies interact. A ministry serious about digital competition, and bound by its own coalition agreement to strengthen these tools, had an obvious opening to clarify that interface. It chose not to.
Why restraint here is the right call
But the case for leaving Section 19a alone is stronger than the draft's critics allow. Germany moved first and moved hard on platform-specific abuse control with the 10th GWB-Novelle in 2021 — well before the DMA existed. Five designations and multiple confirmed enforcement actions later (the Bundesgerichtshof upheld the Amazon determination on appeal), the provision has already done its job of establishing that Germany can act against dominant platforms without waiting for Brussels. Layering a second, expanded set of national obligations on top of a fully operational EU gatekeeper regime — one still in its early enforcement years — would multiply compliance burdens for the same five or six companies without a clear efficiency gain. Overlapping national and supranational rulebooks are precisely the kind of regulatory duplication that raises costs for compliance teams and creates litigation risk over which regime controls, without demonstrably improving outcomes for consumers or smaller competitors. A ministry that instead waits to see how DMA enforcement actually plays out before re-legislating at the national level is exercising exactly the kind of proportionality this publication has consistently argued for: don't build a second gun before you know whether the first one works.
That restraint is also visible in where the bill's actual ambition landed. The merger-control provisions raise Germany's worldwide-turnover notification threshold by 50%, from €500 million to €750 million, and add two new domestic thresholds — changes projected to cut merger notifications by roughly 13–14% a year, according to the Bundeskartellamt's own impact assessment cited by outside counsel tracking the bill (Cleary Antitrust Watch). A new procurement-screening power lets the Bundeskartellamt cross-reference bid data from public contracting authorities to detect collusion. Both are targeted, evidence-driven interventions aimed at freeing up enforcement capacity for cases that matter — the opposite of expanding a rulebook for its own sake.
The honest read
The Bundeskartellamt itself, in its formal comments on the draft, registered the gap between the coalition agreement's digital-antitrust rhetoric and what actually appears in the text. That's a fair criticism of political messaging, not of the substance. If Berlin genuinely believes Section 19a and the DMA need better coordination, that's a project worth doing carefully — through a dedicated interface reform, informed by a few more years of parallel enforcement data — rather than bolted onto a bill whose real work is elsewhere. A €750,000 fee ceiling that merely tracks 37 years of inflation is not a retreat from digital enforcement; it's an acknowledgment that the tool Germany already built is still functioning as designed.