Which supervisory authority has jurisdiction over my webshop if I sell in multiple EU countries?

Each EU Member State has its own market surveillance authority

If you supply to customers in multiple EU countries, you will in practice deal with multiple market surveillance authorities, not a single European body. The European Accessibility Act is a directive: each Member State transposes the requirements into its own legislation and designates its own market surveillance authority for the market within its borders. For the Netherlands, that is the Autoriteit Consument & Markt; for Germany, the Marktüberwachungsstelle der Länder für die Barrierefreiheit (MLBF) in Magdeburg; for France, the DGCCRF together with ARCOM; and for Belgium, the Economische Inspectie of the FOD Economie. A webshop supplying to customers in all these countries thus falls in principle under each of these regimes at the same time, each with its own law, its own maximum penalty and its own notification route.

This applies to supervision and enforcement; the technical requirement behind it, however, is the same everywhere. In all 27 Member States, compliance is assessed against EN 301 549, in practice WCAG 2.1 level AA — a webshop that meets that standard will in principle meet it in each of these countries. What differs is not the standard, but what happens if a site does not comply: in Germany the official maximum penalty is € 100,000 lower than in the other three countries, but there is also a faster route through competitors and industry associations that can send an Abmahnung for unfair competition. In France the maximum is € 250,000, the highest among these, with advocacy groups also sending cease-and-desist notices. In Belgium, a maximum of € 200,000 per infringement applies, not per case. The exemption for microenterprises — fewer than ten employees and a turnover of at most two million euros — applies equally in each of these countries, because it comes directly from the directive. For countries outside these four, such as Spain, Italy or Poland, it has not yet been established who the market surveillance authority is and what penalties apply; suppliers to those countries are well advised to consult the official source in that country.

Where this follows from: the directive and the national transposition laws

That each country designates its own market surveillance authority and sets the penalties itself follows from the nature of Directive (EU) 2019/882: the directive sets the objective and the standard, but leaves implementation and enforcement to the Member States. For the Netherlands, this is worked out in the Implementatiewet toegankelijkheidsvoorschriften producten en diensten; for Germany in the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz; for France in the transposition within the Code de la consommation; and for Belgium in the Wetboek van economisch recht — four separate laws with the same European standard at their core.