KGI’s work on competition regulation and enforcement in digital markets synthesizes leading research, bridging independent research with policymaking across various jurisdictions. We examine novel regulatory and enforcement tools and strategies, with a focus on understanding which approaches effectively promote competition.
Hardly a day goes by without competition regulation or enforcement involving tech companies appearing in news headlines around the world. From app stores and browsers to social networking, advertising, and AI-powered consumer services, dominant platforms shape how billions of people around the world access information.
KGI works to synthesize leading research on digital markets competition, bridging independent research with policymaking across various jurisdictions.
KGI’s marquee annual gathering, the Digital Competition Conference, brings together researchers, policymakers, regulators, litigators, and industry leaders for evidence-based dialogue on the most pressing competition issues in technology markets. Topics range from remedies in search and browsers to competition challenges in app stores, social networking, connected devices, and AI-powered consumer services. The conference serves as a unique venue in Washington where research and policy experts meet to unpack national, transatlantic, and global tech competition developments.
In collaboration with the Institute for Technology Law & Policy (Tech Institute), KGI is spearheading a research project at the intersection of law and economics to examine how competition authorities are addressing the challenges of regulating 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. Using legal research alongside economic analysis, this project aims to map these different approaches and assess their impact on competition dynamics in the digital economy.
Organized by the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) for Georgetown’s Tech & Society Week 2026, this panel will examine the relationship between algorithmic feed design and social and political polarization.
In-person and Livestreamed
Georgetown Capitol Campus
(500 1st St NW Washington, D.C. 20001)
10:00am ET
View this event
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This year’s Digital Competition Conference brought together researchers, policymakers, businesses, litigators, and civil society experts from over 37 countries to explore the latest lessons, challenges, and opportunities in regulating and enforcing competition in digital markets.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
