Summary

  • Georgia's 2020 founding law places LEPL Digital Governance Agency under the Ministry of Justice and gives it both platform and standard-setting responsibilities.
  • RIPE records identify its network. Neither a legal mandate nor an internet route, however, proves that every step of a citizen's transaction works.

A government portal offers a reassuring proposition: one entrance instead of a tour of departments. Georgia's My.gov.ge is such an entrance. Behind it, though, requests still have to reach the right institution, information has to move between systems, and someone has to answer when a handover fails. Making those joins work is central to LEPL Digital Governance Agency, or DGA.

That is a more useful starting point than the one in this article's earlier version. It treated an unsuccessful search for the agency's founding instrument as a consequential gap in public accountability. The instrument is publicly available. So are registry records that the earlier report failed to establish. The correction changes the story: the question is not whether the agency has a documented mandate, but what it does with a mandate that combines operating services and shaping their common rules.

The document was there

The official founding law, No 6297-IIს, was issued on 12 June 2020 and published on 26 June. Article 2 establishes the agency as a legal entity under public law within the governance of the Ministry of Justice. Article 11 gives that ministry state control over it. Legal form and supervision are not labels supplied by a website summary.

There is a version trap worth avoiding. The English text is the initial version, not the latest consolidation. The current Georgian text retains the agency's institutional position and substantive powers. A 2025 amendment removed two paragraphs about the deputy chair from Article 7. Reading the English page alone would miss that change; it would not justify calling the founding law unavailable.

The law also explains why the agency is more than a new sign on an office. Article 13 provides for the merger of Data Exchange Agency and Smart Logic and makes DGA their legal successor. Its institutional starting point joined data exchange with technical delivery. The agency's own history dates its establishment to 10 July 2020. That operational history and the law's June adoption date answer different questions.

A builder with a rulebook

Article 6 assigns DGA management of My.gov.ge and the integration of electronic services. It also covers the shared data-exchange infrastructure, interoperability standards, the state information registry and the introduction and monitoring of a state cloud system. These are not simply ambitions announced at a conference: they are specified functions.

The combination matters. An organisation that helps connect services also has a role in defining how connections should work. A common standard can save separate departments from repeatedly solving the same problem. It can also make a change at the shared layer consequential for many users. Whether that improves reliability depends on implementation, testing and clear responsibilities—not on the existence of the standard alone.

DGA's service catalogue names My.gov.ge, the information registry ROI, the open-data portal and a trade-facilitation system. These are different surfaces. An entry in an information registry describes a resource; it is not the resource itself. A single portal can submit a request without becoming the institution entitled to decide it. Confusing the front door with every office behind it obscures who owes the citizen an answer.

Security adds another set of responsibilities. The agency lists incident response, testing and training among its services. Its qualified-trust page provides links to authorisation decisions and trusted lists. That is a more concrete place to begin checking a particular trust service than a general statement that the agency handles cybersecurity. It does not mean every signature is recognised abroad, or that every private network falls under unlimited DGA supervision.

A network number is not a service guarantee

The agency also has an identifiable internet footprint. RIPE NCC's membership list names LEPL Digital Governance Agency. The organisation record identifies ORG-LDEA1-RIPE as a local internet registry. AS61167, named DEAAS2, points to that organisation.

There is observed routing as well as a registration. RIPEstat records 5.159.20.0/24 through AS61167 during 11–25 October 2026, a window including this article's original publication date. The result excludes routes with very low visibility, so it is not an exhaustive inventory. But it is enough to correct the earlier account of an unverifiable network presence.

The number cannot carry the rest of the argument. A route says nothing by itself about how quickly an application is processed, who owns a server or whether a second agency has received a request. Nor is the registry record's 2012 creation date the founding date of the agency established through the 2020 merger. Institutional and network histories need not begin on the same day.

Follow the handover

The public record now gives counterparties two firm starting points: a statutory organisation and a named network. What it does not provide here is an end-to-end test of the services crossing them. No outage or failed transaction is alleged. The practical test is prospective: when a service depends on several institutions, can each identify its part of the journey and the point at which responsibility passes?

For the citizen, a well-designed common portal should make institutional complexity less visible. For the institutions operating it, that complexity needs to be more explicit, not less. The law establishes who DGA is. A completed, traceable service shows whether the joins are working.

Updated 25 October 2026: the earlier account of an unverified founding instrument and registry footprint has been corrected using the official law, its current consolidation and RIPE records. The unsupported inference that the agency's communications were the only available account of its authority has been removed.