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.