Research Agenda & Bibliography of Proposals by Anna Lenhart: “In recent years, academics, advocates, and policymakers have proposed or discussed the need for a new digital regulator (NDR) – a new agency of the federal government that regulates the AI and technology industry, with a particular focus on market competition, data privacy, and transparency & safety. We have documented over 20 academic papers and studies, think tank reports, books and parts of books, essays and op-eds, and pieces of legislation that propose such agencies or analyze such proposals.
On February 25, 2026, the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University and the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator hosted many of the experts who authored those proposals for a day-long summit to discuss the need for an NDR and open questions related to the design of the agency. Informed by those discussions, this research agenda outlines questions we believe still deserve additional research attention, across disciplines. We are publishing this agenda in hopes to inspire scholarly work on these issues. Some areas may already have work that we have inadvertently missed from our literature review, and we welcome input from those interested in these issues…(More)“.
