On 5 February 2026, Germany's Bundeskartellamt prohibited Amazon from using algorithmic "price control mechanisms" to discipline third-party sellers on amazon.de and ordered the company to disgorge €59 million in economic benefits — explicitly a partial, first-step figure, because the regulator considers the conduct ongoing. It is the first time the authority has ordered disgorgement under Section 19a of the German Competition Act (GWB) since that provision was reformed in 2023, and it marks the regime's shift from designation skirmishes to substantive, money-on-the-table enforcement.
What Section 19a actually does
Section 19a, in force since 2021, lets the Bundeskartellamt designate firms of "paramount significance for competition across markets" and then impose ex-ante prohibitions on specific practices — self-preferencing, tying, data-driven entry barriers, refusals of interoperability or data portability. Five companies are now designated: Alphabet/Google (January 2022), Meta and Amazon (2022), Apple (April 2023) and Microsoft (September 2024). Appeals skip the lower courts and go straight to the Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which on 18 March 2025 upheld Apple's designation, ruling that the law targets an "abstract risk potential" and requires no proof of concrete harm. The Amazon decision is the first to attach a financial consequence to that machinery.
The case for the order
The regulator's logic is strong, and worth stating at full strength. Amazon both runs the marketplace and competes on it. Roughly 60% of online retail sales of goods in Germany run through Amazon, and around 60% of goods on amazon.de come from third-party sellers who depend on the platform for reach. Amazon's mechanisms flagged offers it judged too expensive and either removed them outright or stripped them of the "Buy Box," the default purchase button that drives the overwhelming majority of sales. When the operator of the only viable storefront can quietly demote a rival's listing over a pricing decision, the conflict of interest is structural, not hypothetical. Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt's framing is hard to dismiss: "influencing its competitors' pricing... is only permissible in the most exceptional cases, such as in the event of excessive pricing." If the aim is keeping prices reasonable, he argues, Amazon "could offer sellers appropriate incentives by reducing the fees and commissions they pay rather than restricting the visibility of legally permissible offers." That is a fair hit: the platform was policing a problem it partly created through its own fee load.
Where proportionality gets harder
Two things complicate the picture. First, Amazon's price screens are not purely self-serving. Buy-Box price checks also protect shoppers from gouging and pricing errors — a function the Bundeskartellamt implicitly concedes by carving out "exceptional cases" of excessive pricing. Credit where due: the order does not ban the mechanism, it conditions it on regulator-set criteria. That is the proportionate instinct. The risk is in execution. A marketplace that must clear every price intervention through an antitrust filter may simply stop intervening, and German consumers could end up seeing more, not fewer, inflated listings.
Second, and more structural, Section 19a now sits atop a crowded rulebook. The same self-preferencing and data conduct is already governed by the EU Digital Markets Act, under which Amazon is a designated gatekeeper, and by Article 102 TFEU — which the Bundeskartellamt cited alongside Section 19a in this very decision. The International Center for Law & Economics has argued that national 19a enforcement "undermines" the DMA's purpose as a harmonizing measure, letting Germany "impose its own regulatory vision before the Commission has time to act." Whatever one makes of that framing, the compliance reality is concrete: a single pricing practice can now be litigated simultaneously in Bonn, Brussels and Karlsruhe under three overlapping standards. That is not proportionate regulation so much as regulatory redundancy, and it raises costs for every firm operating in Germany — not only the five giants who can afford the lawyers.
The open-ended number
The €59 million figure is itself a tell. The Bundeskartellamt set it as a "partial amount... in a first step" precisely because the violation is ongoing — meaning the eventual bill is undefined and accrues until Amazon complies on the regulator's terms. Open-ended disgorgement creates a powerful incentive to settle on whatever conditions the authority demands, which concentrates discretion in the agency rather than the courts. The BGH's March 2025 Apple ruling, holding that designation needs only "abstract risk," already lowered the evidentiary bar at the front end; pairing a low designation threshold with an uncapped, accruing penalty at the back end is a combination the appeal courts should scrutinise carefully.
The verdict
Strip away the architecture and the underlying call is defensible. A dominant marketplace policing the prices of sellers it competes against is a genuine harm, and a conditional remedy — not a flat ban — is the right answer to it. The problem is less this decision than the system it advertises: a fast-track, abstract-risk designation regime, an uncapped disgorgement tool, and near-total overlap with EU law that Germany shows little intention of deferring to. Pro-competition enforcement is most credible when it is also predictable. Section 19a's first financial strike lands on a real target. Whether the regime can repeat that precision without duplicating Brussels and chilling legitimate platform conduct is the question the BGH — and Amazon's near-certain appeal — will now have to answer.