The Bundestag wants to restrict the market power of large IT groups such as Google, Apple Facebook and Amazon under antitrust law. To this end, on Thursday he passed the government draft for the tenth reform of the Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB) with a few changes. In addition to the coalition factions of the CDU / CSU and SPD, the Greens also voted for the initiative. AfD, FDP and the Left abstained.

With the draft law, the Bundestag wants abusive behavior by companies with paramount, cross-market importance to better counteract competition. With specific data access regulations, he wants to promote innovations and keep markets open. Platform operators should not be able to treat offers from competitors, for example in search results, worse than their own.

In the future, the Federal Cartel Office should be able to more easily take “interim measures” to prevent the Protect competition at an early stage. At the same time, the investigative powers of the cartel authorities are being expanded. Companies should have more legal security in cooperation for the common use of data or the development of portals. In the future, market abuse should exist, for example, if a company refuses “to supply another person with goods or commercial services for a reasonable fee, in particular to grant him access to data, networks or other infrastructure facilities”.

Sanctions The Federal Cartel Office should be able to determine that a company “is of paramount importance for competition across the market”. Criteria for this are, for example, the financial strength or other resources of a company, its vertical integration and its access to competition-relevant data.

As a remedy, the Cartel Office can prohibit a company from making its own offers to those of To give preferential treatment to competitors, to hinder competitors or to erect or increase barriers to entry through the use of data relevant to competition. The interoperability of products or services or the portability of data must not be denied in such a case.

The coalition has added various examples and behaviors compared to the government draft, such as the sole pre-installation of its own products . This partially coincides with the planned EU requirements via the Digital Market Act.