Digital Markets

The Technical Committee is a key component of the remedies ordered in the US v. Google search antitrust case, intended to ensure effective implementation of court-ordered obligations and technical measures to promote competition in online search. KGI’s latest report provides a practical blueprint for the formation, structure, and operation of this independent body of experts.

In its first full year in operation, KGI made its mark across technology policy venues and outlets. Through expert-led, evidence-based work, KGI helped inform policy approaches to algorithmic feed design, researcher access to data, and competition enforcement in the search market – demonstrating how independent research can shape real-world decisions in the United States and Europe.

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.

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.