By: Shruti Das, Josefina Piddo, and Apolline Ancel
The global internet is moving away from long-standing U.S. hegemony, even as a small number of platforms headquartered in the U.S. grow more powerful and entrenched than ever. This tension formed a throughline of the inaugural Digital Governance for Democratic Renewal conference on Oct. 30, 2025, when experts from government, academia, journalism and civil society gathered at the Lee C. Bollinger Forum to examine where power resides in the digital ecosystem and what it would take to redirect platforms toward democratic ends.
Hosted by Columbia World Projects and the Centre for Digital Governance at the Hertie School, with support from the Knight Foundation, the conference kicked off with a public panel on the evening of Oct. 29, featuring Lina Khan, Adam Tooze and Cory Doctorow. The discussion examined widening transatlantic divides in digital policy and surfaced urgent questions about the future of online life and the institutions responsible for governing it. The following day, closed-door sessions held under Chatham House Rule focused on a core challenge: What does effective, democratically legitimate platform regulation look like when transatlantic coordination is strained and U.S. political leadership appears increasingly aligned with the very firms regulators seek to govern?
Participants approached this question from multiple angles, including the limits of antitrust as it is currently practiced, tensions between digital privacy and transparency, the emerging politics of interoperability and data access, and shifting alliances both inside and outside the platforms themselves. Taken together, these discussions pointed to a sobering conclusion: Democratic renewal in the digital era will require new infrastructure, new coalitions and new policy tools.
Read more insights from the conference.
Examining Digital Market Governance
Building on this momentum, the Columbia-Hertie initiative is launching a new working group to examine emerging uncertainties in the governance of U.S. and European digital markets, with particular attention to growing transatlantic tensions at the intersection of antitrust, competition and industrial policy. From March through Oct. 2026, the group will assess which policy tools can be realistically administered under conditions of uncertainty, how much administrative discretion is compatible with democratic governance, and how geography, regulatory arbitrage and institutional design shape enforcement outcomes.