About

Mission

The Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) is dedicated to connecting independent research with technology policy and design. Georgetown University and the Knight Foundation came together to launch the institute as a central hub for the growing network of scholarship that seeks to shape how technology is used to produce, disseminate, and access information. KGI is designed to provide practical resources that policymakers, journalists, and private and public sector leaders can use to tackle information and technology issues in real time

KGI was created at Georgetown to address the most pressing policy issues facing the online information environment. The internet and digital technologies have enabled the dramatic expansion of access to information and ideas, helped amplify millions of marginalized voices, and bolstered movements for justice around the world. But the technologies that once promised to usher in a new era of democracy are also being used to spread disinformation, undermine social and institutional trust, and disenfranchise participants in the democratic process. Underlying this shift is the growing concentration of power over information production and distribution systems in the hands of a few corporate giants.

KGI’s mandate is to channel the insights, evidence, and brainpower from the research and public interest communities to form a collective response to these trends. Independent technology research is now a vital component of our nation’s intellectual infrastructure, spanning social science, data science, computer science, communications, economics, law, and beyond. KGI distills salient insights from across this vibrant and growing research field into actionable resources that inform critical decisions in policy and industry. KGI also acts as a convener, building relationships between leading academics and key decisionmakers. 

Through research production, translation, synthesis, and convening, KGI creates a necessary defense against the increasingly closed and privatized systems mediating access to information today.

1. Service for the common good

Housed at Georgetown University and aligned with Georgetown’s Mission, KGI supports the development of evidenced-based technology policies that promote the common good. With the use of technology ubiquitous across nearly all facets of society, KGI works to realize a technology future that moves away from the closed and privatized systems mediating access to information today.

2. Nonpartisanship

As an independent, 501(c)(3) nonpartisan Institute focused on building an information future for the common good, we undertake and support nonpartisan research, analysis and collaboration to better inform technology policy and design. Our commitment to nonpartisanship underpins how we collaborate with partners and engage with policymakers.

3. Academic rigor

KGI works to ensure policies are informed through rigorous, independent research. We support efforts to identify areas of consensus and priority questions to forge more evidence-based responses to pressing issues related to technology, policy, and ethics. We do not accept funding which could hinder our ability to conduct our operations free of influence. An expert Steering Council contributes to the strategic direction and ongoing programs of the Institute.

4. Open collaboration

Collaboration is core to KGI’s mission and methods of work. We identify areas of focus and build shared strategies with scholars, policymakers, advocates, practitioners, and those impacted by technology. We work across a wide range of perspectives and disciplines – including social science, computer science, law, economics, journalism – to identify priority policy and design recommendations. We seek to continually improve in ways that ensure meaningful and reciprocal engagement across diverse technology fields.

5. Optimization for impact

We inform live policy discussions and real-time decisions affecting individuals and societies today. We serve as a bridge between the research field and policy and industry practitioners, adapting how evidence and findings from research are communicated to meet the needs and timelines of policymakers.

Issues

KGI seeks to inform policy debates by translating existing research, producing novel research and policy outputs, and synthesizing evidence about the impacts of policy interventions domestically and abroad. Our work is situated within two related fields of technology policy: platform governance and competition policy.

Platform Governance

Under the broad umbrella of platform governance, KGI has two workstreams: platform design and public data access.

Platform Design

There is broad recognition that the way platforms are designed impacts how users, communities, and societies experience benefits and harms from those platforms. The pitfalls of content moderation – including efficacy, consistency, legality, and business sustainability – have spurred a large and growing movement in academia, civil society, and public policy focused instead on how content-agnostic design patterns can more effectively support prosocial interactions and user well-being. 

Federal, state, and international legislators and enforcement authorities have proposed and adopted a variety of approaches to regulate platform designs and their impacts. In the US, regulating effectively in this area requires grappling with a host of complex questions related to the First Amendment and Section 230 that will continue to be contested for years to come. Yet the existing research is only loosely connected to many ongoing policy development efforts. The maturation of policymaking in this area will require bolstering scientific consensus about which platform design changes effectively mitigate which harms, how to understand the tradeoffs, how to measure and evaluate design changes, and numerous other questions. KGI is working to deepen research-to-policy connections and convene stakeholders in support of this agenda.

Public Data Access

For over a decade, stakeholders both inside and outside platform companies have debated what data platforms should disclose and to whom. Thanks to transparency advocates, we have seen various transparency regimes take hold—voluntary, self-regulatory, and regulatory—requiring platforms to share information about their activities, algorithms, and processes with vetted entities including researchers, regulators, or business competitors, and sometimes with the broader public. At the same time, some organizations and individuals have been willing to risk navigating a thicket of legal and ethical risks to independently gather (scrape) publicly available platform data.

KGI is focused on public access to public platform data as a means to enable any interested party to understand the relationships between online platforms and individuals, communities, and societies. As a collective, the research community has intimate familiarity with the benefits and limitations of having access to particular kinds of data sets, including those obtained by agreement with the platforms, via scraping or other independent means, and via APIs that were once broadly available but are no longer (CrowdTangle, X/Twitter, and Reddit, for example). Our work on public data access harnesses this knowledge to achieve practical and policy changes that expand public access to public data. Learn more about our work to develop a Gold Standard for Publicly Available Platform Data.

Competition Policy

Competition policy in the tech sector stands at a unique juncture. The global reassessment of competition policy frameworks governing online services over the last half-decade has yielded a docket of major antitrust cases in the US and novel ex-ante regulatory regimes in the EU, UK, and elsewhere. The next several years will be crucial in determining whether new theories of anticompetitive harm and new paradigms of enforcement will lead to meaningful change in the markets that shape information production and consumption globally.

KGI’s is working to synthesize what can be learned from the implementation of ex ante enforcement regimes abroad and channel that knowledge into ongoing debates about antitrust enforcement and competition policy in the US. Experience with the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) provides the basis for a wealth of empirical and implementation analysis related to online search, mobile operating systems, messaging, advertising, and social media. Do the specific obligations and prohibitions that the DMA has introduced lead to meaningful change in market entry or structure? What is required in terms of data, analysis, and stakeholder participation for regulators to be able to effectively enforce the DMA’s provisions? These and numerous other questions are ripe for analysis, and KGI is serving as a central hub in DC to distill and share answers and evidence as they are produced.

KGI also works to bring experts from across a broader range of domains and disciplines into the competition policy conversation. Many interventions that have been proposed or adopted to stimulate greater competition in information industries bear on highly technical aspects of service and application design, including choice architecture, privacy, security, platform integrity, API access, data access, and more. These interventions have a greater chance of being effective if more experts with technical and business expertise are part of the conversation as these approaches are being designed and analyzed. KGI is convening such experts together with antitrust lawyers and economists to facilitate cross-pollination and dialogue.