George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

Exploring the Role of Data Enclosure in the Digital Political Economy

Dr. Brenden Kuerbis, a Research Scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Public Policy, and his coauthor Dr. Milton Mueller, Professor and Program Director, Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy at the George Institute of Technology, have published the paper “Exploring the Role of Data Enclosure in the Digital Political Economy”. The paper can be read here.

New Publication: COPPAcalypse? The Youtube Settlement’s Impact on Kids Content

New research from James Cooper, Garrett Johnson, Tesary Lin, and  Liang Zhong uses YouTube’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) as a natural experiment to evaluate the impact of eliminating personalization— including tailored ads and platform features like personalized search and content recommendations—on made-for-kids content.  The study of  5,066 top American YouTube channels from 2018-2020 finds that child-directed content creators produce 13% less content and pivot towards producing non-child-directed content. On the demand side, views of child-directed channels fall by 22%. Consistent with the platform’s degraded capacity to match viewers to content, the study finds that content creation and content views become more concentrated among top child-directed YouTube channels.  Read the full study here.

(Video) Research Paper Summary: Effects of Conferring Business Resource on Rivals

In this video, Dr. Jamison summarizes his working paper “Effects of Conferring Business Resource on Rivals,” presented at the Research Roundtable on the Data-Competition Interface hosted by the Law & Economics Center’s Program on Economics & Privacy on March 31, 2022, at the Antonin Scalia Law School in Arlington, VA.

Dr. Mark Jamison is the Director and Gerald Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research Center (PURC), and Director of the Digital Markets Initiative (DMI) at the University of Florida.