The Knight-Georgetown Institute Launches New Fritz Fellowship Projects on Digital Competition,Technology Litigation

The Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) has launched two new research projects and is delighted to welcome two Postdoctoral Fellows to the team as part of Georgetown University’s Tech and Society Initiative. These projects are made possible by the Fritz Family Fellowship.

Postdoctoral fellows Brennan Schaffner and Tracy Xu will be focusing on technology policy and litigation research and digital competition, respectively. Each postdoctoral fellow will lead a team of graduate and undergraduate Fritz Family Fellows. 

The Fritz Family Fellowship Program is an interdisciplinary postdoctoral program designed to cultivate the next generation of leaders at the intersection of technology and society. This new cohort of Fritz Fellows will work on two interdisciplinary research initiatives:

Mapping the Use of Empirical Evidence in Digital Platform Litigation

Postdoctoral Fritz Fellow Brennan Schaffner will spearhead a new interdisciplinary project examining how empirical research is used in technology litigation across the United States. This project is a collaboration between KGI and Georgetown’s Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) program. 

As courts consider cases related to platform governance, addictive design, consumer protection, age verification, and digital platform regulation, this project will map how empirical evidence informs legal arguments and judicial reasoning in technology policy litigation in select state and Federal cases.

Key questions include:

• What types of empirical studies are cited in legal briefs, amicus filings, and judicial decisions related to technology policy litigation?
• What are the disciplinary, methodological, and institutional characteristics of this research?
• How do courts treat such evidence—ignoring it, interpreting it, incorporating it, or relying on it determinatively?
• How does the use of empirical evidence spread from one case, filing, or decision to another?

This project seeks to clarify the role of empirical research in judicial processes and inform future scholarship, policy, and design related to platform accountability. The project is part of KGI’s broader effort to strengthen platform accountability by increasing the use of empirical evidence in litigation through collaboration among litigators, technology researchers, and legal scholars.

Digital Competition Policy Research

Postdoctoral Fritz Fellow Tracy Xu will spearhead a project that examines the novel tools and strategies enforcers of competition law have developed for shaping the development of digital markets. This project is a collaboration between KGI and the Institute for Technology Law & Policy (Tech Institute).

The project team will investigate which enforcement approaches are most effective at enabling competition in digital markets. From the United States to the European Union to other jurisdictions, competition policy has a long list of challenges when attempting to change digital market realities. This has led to competition authorities developing novel strategies and tools for enforcement, including the enactment of stricter legal obligations, extensive market studies, establishing specialized internal units, and hiring staff with expertise in non-traditional fields for competition authorities.

This project aims to map these different approaches and understand whether and how they end up actually changing competition dynamics, including exploring the following questions:

• What practices have competition authorities in different jurisdictions adopted to address and understand the novel challenges presented by competition enforcement in digital markets?
• How did competition authorities structure the implementation and enforcement of these new tools and strategies? What different kinds of expertise have they brought together? What kinds of procedures have they changed?
• And, most importantly, have these new strategies effectively changed (or, at least, are they on a path to changing) outcomes related to market competition, including levels of concentration, barriers to entry, and consumer experimentation with smaller providers?

About the partners

Communication, Culture & Technology

Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) program is an interdisciplinary Master’s degree program devoted to the study and design of communication, media, and information technology in the full scope of their social, political, cultural, technical, and economic complexity. CCT promotes a holistic, multidisciplinary analysis of communications and media systems, expanding the boundaries of theory, substantive knowledge, making, and practice. CCT’s curriculum prepares students to be critical thinkers, exemplary scholars, and content creators who apply their knowledge in meaningful ways to the problems and challenges of a world being shaped by the globalizing forces of computational and digital communication and information technologies and international media systems. Learn more about CCT here.

Knight-Georgetown Institute

The Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) serves as a central hub for translating research into practical resources that policymakers, journalists, and private and public sector leaders can use to tackle information and technology issues in real time, ranging from artificial intelligence to the spread of misinformation and disinformation.

KGI helps policymakers and tech industry leaders address pressing issues related to technology, policy, and ethics and make informed decisions on how technology is used to shape, produce, and share information across platforms. The institute will also train the next generation of leaders to shape the future of information and technology for the common good.

The Tech Institute

The Tech Institute is a hub for policymakers, academics, advocates, and technologists to study and discuss how to center humans and the social good, using technology as a tool. We train the next generation of lawyers and lawmakers with deep expertise in technology law and policy and provide non-partisan insights to policymakers on issues relating to new and emerging technologies. With the leading academic program for law and technology in the United States, we also foster interdisciplinary approaches to solving complex technology law and policy problems. The Tech Institute also identifies and creates opportunities for technology to improve access to justice.

These Fritz Family Fellowship projects will run through the fall of 2027.