German Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrives in Washington next week for his second official visit since taking office, bringing with him a raft of bilateral priorities to discuss with Trump Administration officials. Trade, defense, and transatlantic cooperation will top the agenda—but U.S. officials shouldn’t let the occasion pass without raising a glaring example of European government overreach that directly harms American small businesses: Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has fined Amazon for using price-filtering tools that help prevent price gouging on its marketplace.
Yes, you read that correctly. German competition enforcers are punishing a curated online marketplace (COM) for trying to keep prices reasonable for consumers.
The Price of Trust
The German FCO’s enforcement action challenges Amazon’s practice of monitoring for significantly overpriced items and taking measures to protect consumers from price gouging. The agency argues this unfairly restricts sellers’ pricing freedom under Germany’s competition law framework—a framework modeled closely on the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and designed to regulate large platforms designated as having “paramount significance.” Under this logic, preventing a merchant from charging $50 for a product widely available at $20 constitutes anticompetitive conduct.
For small businesses that depend on consumer trust to convert browsers into buyers, this reasoning is perverse. ACT’s startup and small tech members know that distribution channel selection matters enormously to their success and growth. When you’re a startup competing against established brands with marketing budgets you can’t match, you need every advantage you can get. One of those advantages is selling through online marketplaces that actively manage their ecosystems to maintain consumer confidence. Shoppers who trust they’re seeing competitive prices—not opportunistic gouging—are far more likely to complete purchases from sellers they’ve never heard of.
Amazon’s price-filtering tools serve precisely this function. They don’t ban higher-priced offers; those listings remain available on the COM. The tools simply trigger review of exorbitantly high prices, creating incentives for reasonable pricing while maintaining a trustworthy shopping environment. Small businesses disproportionately benefit from this curation. A household-name brand can command premium pricing based on reputation alone. A small innovator selling through an online marketplace needs that marketplace’s credibility as a proxy for their own.
Punishing Proactive Management
The FCO’s challenge exemplifies a broader problem with how European competition frameworks approach COM regulation. Both the DMA and Germany’s domestic law treat common marketplace management functions as presumptively suspect. Price filtering, quality standards, fraud prevention measures—practices that create value for both consumers and small business sellers—become potential violations when the COM grows successful enough to trigger regulatory designation.
This approach inverts competition law’s traditional purpose. Instead of protecting competitive markets that benefit consumers and enable small business entry, it protects individual competitors’ claimed right to operate free from marketplace rules—even when those rules make the marketplace more attractive to consumers and more valuable to other small businesses. The FCO framed its action as defending seller autonomy, but what autonomy exists in practice when the result is a degraded marketplace where price gouging erodes consumer trust and legitimate small sellers lose conversions?
We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly as European enforcers implement the DMA. The Commission has challenged app store security reviews, restricted interoperability requirements meant to protect user data, and second-guessed content moderation decisions. Each intervention is defended as promoting competition or fairness, but the practical effect is to limit the proactive management that makes COMs viable distribution channels for small businesses in the first place.
A Transatlantic Opportunity
Chancellor Merz’s visit offers U.S. trade officials an opportunity to make clear that these enforcement approaches don’t serve innovation or small business interests on either side of the Atlantic. The Trump Administration has shown a willingness to challenge European regulatory overreach when it threatens American companies and economic interests. This case warrants that attention, not just because Amazon is a U.S. company, but because the underlying enforcement philosophy harms the small innovators, both in the United States and Germany, that run successful businesses on the marketplace.