Neutrality, Transparency, Checks & Balances

In today's consumer-facing online platforms that match buyers and sellers of any resource, design priorities typically include profit extraction, price uplifts, disadvantaging competing markets and lock-in of users. These features are so subtly embedded it can be easy to miss the ways they distort and disadvantage. They can be demonstrably designed out in an alternative system of markets.

Other pivotal technologies - water supply, electricity, railways, roads - are each subject to strict governance requirements to ensure universal service. Companies running these facilities may make healthy profits, but their power over the public is capped.

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This paper sets out a comparable governance regime for "POEMs" (Public Official E-Markets), a comprehensive system of interlocking e-markets initiated by a government concession. Aiming for a trustworthy service that can be taken for granted as part of a democratic market economy, there are three planks to good governance. Neutral treatment of users must be a given along with accountable transparency and a balance of powers between government, operators and users of the markets.

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