An Abmahnung is a cease-and-desist letter from a competitor rather than from a regulator, and in Germany it is the accessibility risk actually landing on doormats. German unfair competition law lets a rival demand that you stop breaking a rule that gives you an edge over them, and the demand turns up with the sender's legal costs attached and a pre-written promise for you to sign. That promise is the expensive half rather than the invoice, because it binds with no end date and carries a penalty that falls due the next time the same fault appears on your site. The law is stricter with the sender than most people expect. The letter has to state five specific things to be worth anything, and where it does not, the business that received it can claim its own defence costs back, up to the amount that was demanded.
In practice
Read the letter against the five things the statute says it has to contain, and do that before you sign a word of it. It has to name the sender, and any lawyer acting for them. It has to set out why that sender is entitled to complain at all, which for a competitor means they really do sell or buy comparable goods or services, to a more than trivial extent and more than occasionally. It has to say whether costs are being claimed, how much, and how the figure was reached. It has to describe the breach with the actual facts rather than in general terms. Where any of that is missing the letter is defective, and a defective letter changes what happens next.
The document to be careful with is the undertaking enclosed with it, not the invoice. Signing it settles the dispute and creates a contract that runs with no end date and carries a penalty for any repeat. So a promise signed in a hurry over one page can be enforced years later over a different page with the same fault. German practitioners are close to unanimous that this is the thing not to sign quickly, and that a modified undertaking drafted by your own lawyer is usually what goes back instead.
Know the shape of the German risk before you price the response. The state market surveillance body has been running since September 2025 and moved into active control in January 2026, and as of July 2026 no individual fine from it had been publicly documented. The letters are what is arriving. That is why the practical order of risk for a business selling into Germany runs competitor first, conciliation second, regulator last, which is the reverse of what most owners assume.
Why it matters
The whole theory rests on a question no German court appears to have answered yet, which is whether an accessibility failure counts as breaking a rule about market conduct at all. That is the load-bearing uncertainty, and both the specialist and the legal commentary we read describe the argument rather than citing a judgment. It matters in two directions. It means the letters are not obviously well founded, which is worth knowing before you pay one. And it means nobody can tell you the answer with confidence yet, so the sensible position is to fix the site, because that removes the argument whichever way the question lands.
The counterclaim nobody mentions
Where the letter is unjustified, or where it leaves out any of the five required items, the business that received it can claim back what it spent defending itself, capped at the sum the sender demanded. The one relief the sender gets is that an unfounded letter costs them nothing if they genuinely could not have known they had no case. So a sloppy letter can cost the person who sent it. That is not a reason to ignore one. It is a reason to have somebody read it properly before deciding that paying is the cheap option.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- European Accessibility ActThe European Accessibility Act is the EU law that has required certain consumer products and services to be accessible since 28 June 2025, and the word to hold onto is certain.
- EN 301 549EN 301 549 is the European standard for accessible information and communication technology, written first for public procurement and now the document European accessibility law reaches for when it needs a technical answer.
- Conformance claimA conformance claim is an optional formal statement that content meets WCAG at a stated level.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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