The Bundeskartellamt can prevent companies deemed crucial for competition in the market from engaging in anti-competitive practices.

German antitrust authority: The Bundeskartellamt – the federal competition authority in Germany – has confirmed that Apple is one of the companies considered fundamental for competition in the market. Therefore, the activities controlled by the Cupertino company can be subject to controls to prevent abuses according to the rules set out in Section 19 of the German Federal Competition Act. The section referred to by the Authority came into force in January 2021 as part of an amendment to the Competition Act. With a two-step approach, the Bundeskartellamt can prevent companies deemed crucial for competition in the market from engaging in anti-competitive practices.

Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt, said: ‘Apple has an economically powerful position in the various markets with insufficient scope for competition. With its mobile devices such as iPhones, Apple operates a large digital ecosystem that is of great importance for competition, not only in Germany, but also for Europe and the world. With its proprietary iOS products and the App Store, Apple holds a key position in competition, and in offering access to the ecosystem to Apple users. This decision specifically allows us to intervene and effectively prohibit anti-competitive practices’. No action was taken against Apple, but rules such as those imposed by the House against the tracking of user activity were examined to check possible dominant positions of Apple against competitors.

Everything revolves around Section 19

In recent years, Germany has enacted various regulations to give the Competition Authority more penetrating powers in enforcing antitrust law. Section 19 considers undertakings that are active in multilateral markets and that are of fundamental importance for competition between markets; these are identified through a list of various criteria, taking into account their dominance in one or more markets, access to data, financial power and vertical integration, allowing the Bundeskartellamt to conduct cross-market analyses and to prevent abusive expansion into non-dominated markets.

Having established that a company is of fundamental cross-market importance, the Bundeskartellamt maỳ prohibits it from engaging in practices deemed abusive, obstructing competitors in markets where the company could expand its position, creating barriers to entry in one market by exploiting data collected in another market in which the company is in a dominant position, restrict the interoperability of products or the portability of data as well aś so-called “self-preferencing”, in other words, favouring its products over those of its competitors.