Whitepapers

A body of recent legal scholarship argues that digital platforms exercise a distinct form of power — ecosystem power — operating simultaneously through three roles: as gatekeepers, as legislators of the relationships within their ecosystems, and as contractual actors participating in the transactions they rule on. Adjacent work proposes distributive equity as a candidate additional consideration for antitrust enforcement.

This paper documents a single worked example: a community-scale platform (Village, operated by My Digital Sovereignty Limited, Aotearoa New Zealand) whose structural commitments are the enactment of a prior theoretical commitment — that the welfare pathology identified in the research programme is best understood as a values drift pathology, and that structural architecture is the mechanism by which a platform's declared values can be made sticky enough to resist that drift. The paper situates Village's commitments inside the Tractatus framework that generated them — a constitutional architecture grounded in Wittgenstein, Berlin, Ostrom, Alexander, and Te Ao Māori frameworks of indigenous data sovereignty.

Most EU community organisations will meet the AI Act by accepting their existing vendor’s defaults. The vendor determines the model, the data-handling posture, and the jurisdictional routing of every query. The community organisation inherits all of this by signing a procurement form. This is not compliance; it is delegation.

This brief describes an alternative already in production: the Village platform, built around a three-layer constitutional architecture that anchors community values in the platform’s code, and a Situated Language Layer trained on the community’s own authorised material. The brief sets out three mechanisms (Situated Language Layer, Guardian Agents, Federation), maps each to the EU regulatory hook it engages (AI Act, EMFA, GDPR Art. 9), and describes the structural audit criteria an adopting community or business can run for itself. The toolkit was built under Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations to Māori communities in New Zealand; the architectural consequence of meeting that constraint is what the brief offers to EU readers.