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When the government launched an antitrust lawsuit against Google five years ago, it was all about whether the tech giant had a monopoly on internet search. But by the time the judge ruled on punishments for the company this month, the future of artificial intelligence was front and center.

New web standards could limit AI’s access to websites in profound ways, and Big Tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are trying to halt or water down the effort.

The Knight-Georgetown Institute is pleased to welcome two new Postdoctoral Fritz Family Fellows who will be advancing projects on digital competition and technology policy and litigation.

Today’s post breaks down what just happened and what it means for publishers, marketers, consumers, Big Tech, AI, growth and copyright.

US District Judge Amit Mehta’s order and opinion following a remedy trial in the government’s Internet search monopolization case against Google “pays lip service to the well-supported finding that a package of remedies is required to address the interlocking, mutually reinforcing dynamics of the search market,” according to the Knight-Georgetown Institute.

Despite Google’s resounding defeat last year in the U.S. Department of Justice’s case targeting its search monopoly, the company will face only a mixed bag of remedies aimed at propping up search engine rivals and limiting its distribution contracts.

In a ruling aimed at restoring competition in the search engine market, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta refrained from ordering Google to sell off Chrome, the world’s most popular browser, but ordered the tech company to end exclusive deals that make Google the default search engine on phones and other devices.

On February 5-6, 2026 in Washington, DC, the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI), the Yale Tobin Center’s Digital Economy Project, and Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) will co-host the Digital Competition Conference 2026, an annual policy and research event that explores the lessons, challenges, and opportunities of competition regulation and enforcement in digital markets. The conference brings together researchers, policymakers, businesses, litigators, and civil society for evidence-driven dialogue about business practices that may pose unfair competition risks, possible remedies, and areas for future analysis.

A group of researchers wants to help state lawmakers get smarter about writing laws that regulate social media feeds — and they’ll be detailing their ideas here this week at the National Conference of States Legislatures’s annual legislative summit.

An estimated 4 billion people around the world use Chrome. But what if Google didn’t control the world’s most-used web browser? There’s a chance this question might no longer be hypothetical. In the U.S. government’s landmark antitrust case against Google for illegally monopolizing the online search market, one of the most consequential and hotly debated remedies on the table is the proposed spin-off of Chrome—a browser that drives more than a third of Google’s search traffic and acts as a powerful gatekeeper to the internet.

Four billion people use Chrome to access the web but after three antitrust losses, the Department of Justice has demanded the browser is spun out and handed to a new custodian to power the next generation of the open web.

We are joined by leading voices in tech policy and browser tech to discuss how big a job that actually is. Alissa Cooper is the executive director of the Knight Georgetown Institute, and Eric Rescorla is the former CTO of the Firefox browser.

In June, the European Commission announced that AliExpress agreed to a number of binding commitments to address concerns raised in proceedings under the Digital Services Act (DSA). This analysis for Tech Policy Press breaks down the AliExpress commitments and why they matter, with a focus on how commitments for recommender system transparency, access to public data for researchers, and monitoring can lead to meaningful accountability.