Notes from the Digital Competition Conference

This week I (Mallory) was at the Digital Competition Conference hosted by the Knight Georgetown Institute representing SWF. Conversations unlocked cooperation between tech, law and regulation that is needed to rein in market abuse by gigantic digital infrastructures. What made this conference especially valuable was how consistently the discussion balanced between all three.

I was particularly happy to see a strong focus on technical realities: not just what regulators want to do, but what is actually feasible and desirable given how systems are experienced by users, and how they are built, secured, and governed today. The agenda was strong and  featured four technical talks that cut through the usual abstractions and tackled real trade-offs head-on.

My colleague Daji Landis  at NYU presented Security vs. Interoperability, which helpfully disentangles when security concerns are legitimate and when they are deployed rhetorically to block competition or interoperability.

Economist Yifei Wang from University of Pittsburgh examined Competition and Privacy, probing where these objectives reinforce one another and where policy frameworks still treat them as falsely opposed.

And Thijmen van Gend from TU Delft along with co-author Seda Gurses closed with The PET Paradox, a critical look at how large platforms instrumentalize privacy-enhancing technologies in ways that can entrench, rather than loosen, market power.

You’d imagine a conference hosted in DC during this political climate would center the EU and US, but the discussion was genuinely international, including perspectives from jurisdictions such as CADE in Brazil. Another standout was Gunn Jiravuttipong’s paper, The Global Race to Rein in Big Tech, which offered an unusually coherent overview of how competition authorities around the world are approaching digital markets.

A final moment that stuck with me came from Alexandre de Streel, who reframed the controversial “digital sovereignty” to “reducing digital dependency,” a more pragmatic and descriptive term. That framing is useful but I think it should be extended slightly. Too often, policy debates imply there is only one path to reducing dependency: building national or regional alternatives to dominant, foreign platforms. In practice, there are at least three distinct options:

1. Expect neutrality and norms from providers. This is the traditional assumption—but as we know by now, technology is not neutral, and governance choices inevitably shape outcomes. That doesn’t mean we give up on accountability for providers, but it isn’t the only remedy.
2. Enable credible exit. Choosing better providers and avoiding lock in only works if switching costs are lowered through interoperability, data portability, and real competition.
3. Re-internalize capacity. Especially for large institutions and governments, there is a third option that deserves more attention: doing more technology provisioning in-house rather than defaulting to privatization or outsourcing in the first place.

All of this lands squarely in the terrain of the social web. Reducing digital dependency is not an abstract policy goal; it is a design challenge that shows up in protocols, defaults, governance, and who gets to participate on fair terms. Interoperability, credible exit, and institutional capacity are not just competition tools, they are preconditions for a pluralistic, resilient online public sphere. From this perspective, the social web is not a niche alternative to dominant platforms but a necessary counterweight