Research & Commentary

As governments around the world move to require age assurance online, attention is growing around whether and how these mechanisms can be implemented accurately and effectively. Recently proposed rules from the New York Office of the Attorney General represent the most significant effort to date by a US public authority to operationalize an age assurance mandate. KGI’s comments on the proposed rules recommend improvements to make them more technically sound and to better account for privacy and service availability.

As the European Commission launches its first-ever statutory review of the Digital Markets Act, KGI’s Alissa Cooper and Tracy Xu joined with a group of European and American scholars to provide a critical assessment of how the regime has performed thus far and  recommendations for how implementation can be strengthened.

The UK’s competition regulator has built solid evidence of Google’s market power in search, but its proposed interventions are not poised to address it. In recently filed comments, KGI explains that without confronting Google’s control over default distribution and sharpening its publisher and user choice rules, the Competition and Markets Authority’s proposed conduct requirements risk preserving the very market power they are meant to constrain.

TikTok’s and Meta’s 2025 DSA risk assessments describe a range of risks and a multitude of mitigations addressing risks to minors: screentime management, parental controls, privacy-oriented design defaults, and restrictions on notifications. However, the risk assessments provide very little information about the level of risks and the effectiveness of chosen mitigations. Internal company documents released in US litigation, on the other hand, tell a different story.

Across the EU and US, two influential digital governance regimes are producing new evidence about how large social media companies assess and respond to potential risks on their platforms. KGI’s latest report compares Meta and TikTok’s EU risk assessments with internal documents emerging from US litigation, revealing significant gaps between public claims about risk mitigation and evidence of how these risks are actually addressed.