The Bundesrat today approved the bill submitted by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy to amend the Act against Restraints of Competition (Ninth Amendment).

Federal Minister Zypries said: “By adopting this amendment, we are making competition law fit for the digital age. Nowadays, data is an expensive commodity and a power factor. Examples like the takeover of WhatsApp by Facebook show that data is often more important than sales volumes. We have modernised our merger control regime to ensure that the Federal Cartel Office is able to safeguard fair competition in the digital world. In addition, we are putting rules in place to ensure that companies will no longer be able to escape millions of dollars in cartel fines by means of retroactive restructuring or creative shifting of assets. Transferring our rules and values to the digital world is also the goal of the Digital Ministers’ Conference which will take place within the framework of the G20 next week.

In the future, it will be possible to examine takeovers of companies with a particularly high purchase price of over 400 million euros. The Federal Cartel Office will now also be able to take account of phenomena such as network effects, economies of scale and access to competition-related data in the assessment of dominant positions. The amendment also ensures that parent companies and legal successors remain liable for antitrust violations committed by subsidiaries or acquired companies. At the same time, the amended Act transposes the EU directive on antitrust damages into German law.

An overview of the amended Act can be found here.