Today the German Competition Authority has imposed on Facebook restrictions in the processing of user data. The Authority’s decision covers different data sources: Facebook-owned services like WhatsApp and Instagram and third party websites.

On November 29^th, the German Competition Authority launched an investigation against Amazon to examine its terms of business and practices towards sellers on its marketplace amazon.de. The proceeding will focus inter alia on the non-transparent termination and blocking of sellers’ accounts.

In its decision of 12 December, 2017, published on 19 January, 2018, the German Federal Court of Justice decided that ASICS may not forbid its dealers from using price comparison engines. According to the decision, per se prohibitions which are not tied to quality requirements are illegal. The Court found that the infringement of competition law was so obvious that no hearing was required for further clarification and that the case need not be submitted to the European Court of Justice.

The Bundeskartellamt has informed Facebook of its preliminary legal assessment in the abuse of dominance proceeding which the Authority is conducting against the company.

Based on the current stage of the proceedings, the Authority assumes that Facebook is dominant on the German market for social networks. The Authority holds the view that Facebook is abusing this dominant position by making the use of its social network conditional on its being allowed to limitlessly amass every kind of data generated by using third-party websites and merge it with the user's Facebook account. 

The German Competition Authority (Bundeskartellamt) has launched a sector inquiry into the online price comparison websites.

The investigation focuses on comparison websites active in the area of travel, insurance, financial services, telecommunications and energy. By means of questionnaires sent to a large number of website operators, the Bundekartellamt is seeking information on topics such as rankings, financing, corporate links, reviews, availability or relevant market coverage, in order to uncover possible violations of consumer law provisions.