Neutrality, Transparency, Checks & Balances

Operators of POEMs (Public Official E-Markets) gain state-bestowed advantages. They must be made to see the only way to maximize return on their investment in the system is by growing activity for people across the base of a region's economy.

Market manipulation, preferential use of data or undermining of rules applied across the economy are all designed out in the enabling concession. POEMs' operators form a new institution within a market democracy. Surrounded by counterweight powers, they are incentivized to lobby for households and local businesses against corporate interests.

BACKGROUND: A New Institution in the Economy

Equilibrium of power around any implementation of POEMs involves 5 constituencies, each with rights. Some also have obligations. Decision making that shapes the service is split among them.

a) The Balancing Powers

Key actors in POEMs become involved through this sequence:

Commissioning Authority initiate a concession: The authority will most likely be a national or regional government. But in cases where government is dysfunctional or lacks legitimacy it may be a supranational body acting in a temporary capacity until a robust, democratic, government is ready to take over. Legitimacy of this entity is important; in most circumstances it should be the authority that enables power, water supply, roads and comparable facilities for the region.

Operators win the concession: A fair, transparent, open, bidding/award process will confer legitimacy. The concession should have a fixed term, 15 years perhaps, during which operators can uniquely access specified official facilities if complaint with their obligations.

Citizens/businesses choose whether to use POEMs: The new markets system must be universally accessible. Users have rights but must respect operators' freedoms and obligations. Users will also be voters, able to punish politicians for a sloppy concession.

External platforms can choose to interact: POEMs must be ready to support a surrounding ecosystem of unregulated apps, each able to draw on POEMs' data, functionality, and user records (with user-permission). External apps can add their charges.

Nonusers remain protected: No-one is to be compelled to use POEMs (outside of an employer having a right to mandate an employee use their organization's preferred technology, as is already the case). This freedom is vital to continuing legitimacy of the platform, as is the ability for any user to become a nonuser with minimal obstacles.

b) Shaping a New Institution: POEMs' Operators

POEMs should be independent of government. This requires a constituent policy in enabling legislation; the creation of an entity that designs, funds, and runs POEMs for the duration of a concession period. This should be a for-profit organization so that maximizing returns becomes its transparent motivation when dealing with nuances of implementation and operation. Continued licence to operate must be dependent on compliance with public service obligations in the legislation.

Online markets are natural monopolies; sellers want to be where there are most buyers, and vice versa. Purely private-sector market operators have established near monopolies in multiple countries, Uber's dominance in minicab journeys for example. POEMs offers citizens and businesses a choice of de facto monopolies; global verticals in each sector, like Uber; or horizontal (all-sectors in the micro-economy) across one region. (POEMs' concession must offer only a minimal monopoly, explained in this briefing.)

Legislation should curb operators' potential power over the regional economy, not their earnings. Essentially, it offers its winning consortium a pact: As long as you won our jurisdiction’s concession in a genuinely competitive bidding process and abide by its obligations, there will be no constraints on how you structure, curate, or present your markets; nor will there be any cap on your revenue from operations. This means operators have room to innovate, they can trial and make mistakes, as long as they can show their only motivation is striving to legitimately grow activity in their markets, and therefore their income.

c) Rights and Obligations of Each Power

POEMs needs a healthy polity both within its own operation and in the surrounding public institutions on which it relies. Trustworthy courts to act as final arbiters in any dispute between market users for example. There should be responsive checks and balances between the key actors.

Anyone wishing to assess legislation initiating POEMs might look in particular for embedding of these rights and responsibilities:

c) Allocation of Decision Making Between the Powers

Any POEMs implementation will be legitimately shaped by three levels of decision making: foundational, political, and operational. A concession should clarify who decides what in each case.

This tiered shaping can be seen in existing public utilities, such as roads:

Foundational factors: A commitment to solid surfacing, consistent signage, standardized junctions, and enforced rules of driving coupled with universal access are the basics of any region's modern system of highways.

Political judgements: Where roads go, which cities they bypass and whose land they cover in each case are decisions, right or wrong, made by elected leaders within the noisy, imperfect, mechanisms of democracy.

Operational decisions: Commissioned roadbuilders may be left to determine matters such as the optimal camber for rainwater runoff, banking on individual curves, or the siting of central reservations.

Foundational decisions are usually drawn from past experience, and little argued. Some political decisions and operational decisions become charged. Foundations for a public water supply, for example, requires a maximum acceptable level of particulates and minimum pressure at point of delivery. But whether to add fluoride at source is a political decision with negligible impact for operators; pump stations simply adjust their settings based on an amount decided by lawmakers.

This table illustrates where decisions that will shape POEMs and its potential power should be made:

1) Enforcing Neutrality

Operators of POEMs (Public Official, E-Markets) have only one source of revenue, derived from a fixed percentage mark up on each transaction the platform enables. They cannot sell, buy, invest through or take any position in any market they oversee. Nor can they set prices. All these functions are to be openly available to anyone else to do competitively, subject only to legal controls.

These restrictions create a clear path to profitability for operators: attract as many users as possible to markets that treat everyone involved the same. Within this overriding framework there are specific points to be monitored.

a) Ranking of Users

Assessing a counterparty's reliability is vital to purchasing or booking with faith in any marketplace. Today's online exchanges typically rely on subjective rankings, sellers have from zero to five stars based on buyers writing comments about them with star-studded assessments. These rankings are easily gamed, sometimes on an industrial scale. Even when the intent is pure, they are based on individuals' expectations and judgements which will be inconsistent, possibly prejudiced.

Contrast this with holding a clean driving licence. It comes not from other road users having written nice things about your driving but from not being caught breaking rules that keep roads safe for all. If an infraction is detected the process of deciding a penalty, through courts, strives to be objective, transparent, based on clear case law and can be challenged through an appeals process.

Forced into neutrality between users, POEMs can only operate a rankings system that any user can opt in or out of based only on objective tracking of their performance as buyer or seller. ("You have 250 successfully completed work assignments".) It has a unique depth of data on which to do this for any user who wishes to monetize reliable trading by attracting higher paying buyers or lower charging sellers.

The most likely mechanism is a universal table covering perhaps 10 grades of proven reliability. So, starting with no grade, completing a first 5 transactions with no more than one being successfully disputed moves the person or organization up to Grade One, the next rung might be dependent on a further 10 transactions with one or less defaulting, and so on. The aim is to make attainment of higher grades meaningful; a significant boost to earnings and affordability for those who wish to pursue a righteous path in their activity across as many market sectors as they wish.

There must of course be nuances. One obvious scam to be kneecapped is building up a reliable record in transactions with an average value of $50 with a view to pulling a heist on a sale worth thousands. Weighting based on a user's track record for purchases or sales relevant to each new transaction would be a neutrally applied safeguard. Operators must be free to construct these rules as they wish to best attract activity to their markets. But those rules must be published openly in their entirety.

Anyone using POEMs who hankers for robust personal opinions about a counterparty is always free to interface into Yelp or other standalone rating systems. If Yelp were willing, their metrics could guide ordering of counterparties for any intended transaction in POEMs for users willing to accomodate Yelp's business model alongside POEMs' transaction charge.

b) Government as a Market User

Government initiates POEMs then transacts through it. For clarity and convenience there should be some ways that public agencies have preferential status in the system, that must come with responsibilities.

Key areas where an official agency might have preference in listing, buying or selling include:

Tax: Anyone can construct a POEMs fund that deducts a percentage of the income from specified activities for any user choosing to opt-in. The system will use the same software for a church wanting to offer congregants a chance to have 5% of their earnings around the neighborhood tithed to a steeple repair fund as for a government-created fund that can deduct 3.5% sales tax on any purchase of adult clothing at source. But it needs to recognize the later is more important and can be more prominent in its list of options for automatically applied deductions.

Voting: POEMs may be permitted, or compelled, to operate ballots. If so, running a referendum on whether a given street should be closed to traffic on weekends requires similar code to that organizing a national election. Both must confirm eligibility and guard against double voting, then allow monitoring and accountability while preserving ballot secrecy. But one is clearly entitled to far more significance in displays than the other.

Communications: Public agencies may issue product recalls if consumer danger is detected. It's one example of how editorial algorithms in POEMs can be overridden by official messages only.

Pre-emption rights: In an officially declared emergency, public agencies may be given abilities to pre-empt existing bookings of vehicles, supplies and qualified people in POEMs. The extent of this must be clear in the initiating concession and again, no other user can have this right.

Categorized sales: In POEMs' finance markets, government bonds could be a uniquely attractive investment, as they are in larger-scale markets globally. Granting them their own category is not a betrayal of neutrality obligations that can be cited by other providers of debt instruments.

In return for this enhanced status, legislation enabling POEMs might mandate any government-run account, fund or facility within POEMs must be set at full public reporting. Any user can open for example, the accounts for a fund collecting tax on rental of cement mixers, drilling down to the extent of seeing a few cents' payment deducted from their latest booking of a mixer - with identifying details removed from public display - then likewise exploring what those dollars were used to buy in POEMs, or to where they were transferred.

c) Providing Customer Service

POEMs' operators cannot offer a helpdesk. By solving the problems of callers, staff would inevitably be favoring one user. They can of course maintain a system page for queries from users then answer them publicly.

To allow individual support, operators could publish a manual specifically targeting technologically literate workers and colleges. Any educator might use the manual as basis for a course in becoming an accredited POEM's Support Assistant. The platform would provide a market for these trained people in which any could sell their time online for whatever charges each worker wished. Operators might be compelled to place a sum in bond that covers charges for users with, for example, a disability that inhibited their interactions with POEMs.

2) Radical Transparency

Anyone should be able to check POEMs is doing what operators say it does and nothing more. Rigorous checking should be welcomed, and conspiracy theorists serviced. Government and operators should assume they must constantly prove the markets are trustworthy. The only factor that trumps transparency of government or operators' actions and decisions is protection of users' security.

a) Structural Transparency

The concession can enforce openness at every level. That stipulation then becomes part of the price anyone seeking to become part of the operating federation must factor into their willingness.

Rules might specifically compel:

Open lobbying: Government and operators will want to pressure, advise, and enquire of each other throughout the concession period. It must all be open, with correspondence and records of meetings published on a reporting section of the POEMs website. (Some of this lobbying will be healthy, pushing for legislation that maximizes income potential for households and local businesses that might use POEMs because that determines system revenue.)

Relationship reporting: Users are entitled to probe the business connections of consortium members, franchisees, and senior staffers. It all has to be declared, as should salaries of personnel, including bonus metrics.

Published correspondence: POEMs' consortium or franchisees may dialogue with buyers sellers, investors, or nonusers, particularly in franchisees' research of their sector's needs. Such communications must be electronic and again available for anyone to read but with external parties' details anonymized unless they specify otherwise. One user must not know information about, or possible plans for, the system that others don't.

Free literature: Operators can produce training manuals, updated guidance on how to exploit the system or any other materials they wish. But they can't charge for them or restrict their circulation any other way.

b) Operational Transparency

Turning e-markets into an accountable public utility requires tools in the system itself. Each can be verifed by anyone.

Open data: There should be only three categories of data about activity on POEMs; (a) owned by the user (b) published openly with anonymization (c) data that are not compiled. There is no category of privileged information for market operators. That means system performance metrics, server capacity, and other information usually secreted by platform operators has to be published. If operators can see it, so can users.

Open code: Operators must publish their specifications for POEMs in a form that is easily understandable (business rules and screen mock-ups for example), plus the actual code.

Mirror system: A second version of the system must be maintained. It runs the exact code currently on POEMs. But no validation is required to set up an account for the mirror and there are no payment mechanisms for real money. User data is cleansed regularly to deter usage for actual transactions. This allows anyone with a theory about how the markets may be corrupted to register fictitious POEMs users then run interactions between them which they can document to test, possibly prove, their concern. Users wanting to access the parallel system as senior staffers who can make changes to market structures may set up a duplicate installation to do so.

Human interface: Military protocols developed for missile launch point to protections that could be mandated around updating POEMs code, or any backdoor access (such as acting on a search warrant to open a user's activity details). System configuration might, for example, ensure update or viewing an individual user's activity was only possible when three randomly selected staffers each entered parts of a multi-sourced security key with updating of the mirror code and news of the entry automatically published simultaneously. Crucially, there must be no untraceable "quickfix" channel into the system.

Whistleblower facilities: Anyone with a POEMs' consortium staff or franchisee login must be able to access a publicly available site maintained at operators' cost but run independently. It offers a way to openly yet anonymously post concerns. Once logged in with their insider credentials, a person can post any message they wish. Operators can respond, but not amend posts which would be anonymous but validated by the login. Operators should not have legal protection from these claims. Only if the site is misused to libel an external party, can posts be redacted by court order.

Multifaceted inspection: The composition and responsibilities of any regulatory agency overseeing POEMs is a political decision. But a body appointed by the Commissioning Authority should never be viewed as the entirety of POEMs' monitoring. Published code and the mirror system should allow any organization of any nationality or ideological persuasion to scrutinize the system, perhaps referencing a standard checklist, and share findings as they wish. Proactively serving anyone, however outlandish their theories, who wants to poke around POEMs' foundations should reflect the value of those people in fostering reassurance for less vigilant users.

3) Democratic Checks & Balances

Any public utility wields power over users who rely on it. With established infrastructure, a culture of high standards has allowed most of us to slip into complacency about this. E-markets are more nuanced and harder to check. Constant pressure to protect users is good for markets and democracy.

Who regularly checks composition of water piped into their kitchen? But when public water supply was proposed, Victorians feared centralized operators would intentionally poison entire cities. In reality, apart from mistakes or unjustified cost cutting, utility companies have no reason to do so. Short of blatantly degrading service to certain districts, there is little they could do to favor or disadvantage certain users for commercial or ideological reasons.

In a POEMs implementation, a spectrum of stakeholders gain motivation to distort the service and means to do it in hard-to-detect ways. A concession can make new markets a tool for expanding democracy. Operators can be incentivized, or obligated, to act as a voice for players across the micro-economy.

a) Limits to Official Benefits

POEMs' operators gain unique benefits from government for the duration of a concession. This must not be a path to "easy money", only access to facilities that can be leveraged alongside operators' investment into market growth. So operators can't just run minimal tech. or minimize development knowing they have protected status, the concession should mandate:

Minimal monopoly: Operators are not to be granted a monopoly on anything other than a set of officially bestowed benefits that could not realistically be shared among multiple online markets without dissipating the value of the facility in each case. For example, spreading public sector spending across countless platforms loses the leverage that spend could gain to streamline and deepen economic infrastructure.

No protection from competing platforms: There is to be no disadvantaging of other e-market platforms apart from their not having access to the official benefits bestowed on POEMs.

Value test: A commitment that all domestic public spending will go through POEMs is subject to the relevant agency or another party not being able to prove better value available through an alternative channel.

Capped reliance on official facilities: Operators might gain a right for their software to pass cases into the court system or to court appointed mediators where a buyer or seller are in dispute. This could be conditional on mediation software in POEMs that proposes resolutions, which must achieve a mutually acceptable settlement in at least 80% of such disputes. Operators cannot passively rely on the state to resolve issues.

Repositories for exiting users: In pursuit of the above reassurance, a user must be able to transition to nonuser status easily. The complicating factor is records of activity which are held jointly with a counterparty. For example, someone who has completed ten bookings as a carpenter cannot be allowed to just wipe their records; doing so could be used to avoid detection in case of wrongdoing on those bookings. So, operators might be mandated to fund a minimum 25 data depositories, across the geographic and ideological spectrum, licenced to receive exiting POEMs users' records and hold them for a defined period. POEMs then replaces user details with an anonymized unique identifier cross-referencing to the repository. Each departing user chooses which of the repositories they trust to hold their historical data.

b) Support for Democracy

India's Aadhaar official digital identity system has empowered voters but ignited concerns about a centralized government database. Legislation should aim to foster both POEMs' distance from government and its optionality for users. Some sample measures:

Full independence: It took time for governments to relinquish control over central banks. POEMs must not give politicians another opportunity to indirectly shape economic activity, around election cycles for instance. A concession's documentation should be scrutinized to establish that independence from government is enshrined as a right, and an obligation, for operators. If it is ever compromised without operators raising the alarm publicly, consortium members' brands' reputations would be damaged.

Alternative channels maintained: All governmental interactions of a citizen, or lawful entity, in the jurisdiction must remain achievable without a POEMs account. POEMs may be used to vote, respond to official notices, pay taxes, claim assistance, register a change of address and so on. But convenient alternative channels must remain. Operators and government need to show that citizens and entities using POEMs are doing so from choice.

Role of a Regulator: Terms of reference and remit of any entity set up to regulate POEMs in the jurisdiction would be akin to gambling commissions overseeing state or national lotteries. The body should be accountable in its inspections of course, but there is an additional function it could perform as the voice of users for operators: filtering user comments.

Operators should not be obligated to respond to queries or concerns from individual users, it would make them vulnerable to trolling. A regulator could act as independent clearing house for issues, summarizing and ranking them in perhaps monthly published communiques to which operators do have to respond. Users are then able to assess sincerity and competence of selected messages to gauge regulators' efficacy.

Expansion of voting: There is a balance between protecting against fraud and making voting effortless for users. Setting the limits of who can vote through POEMs should be watched for attempts to keep anyone forced to physically attend a voting station because of their political affiliation, real or perceived. For example, a stipulation that only users who have been registered over a year with no issues about their identity arising across a minimum 10 interactions with different counterparties might be neutral, a rule that local governments decide which of their districts will allow voting through POEMs clearly invites bias.

Independence of interfacing: Linking diverse official databases to POEMs requires an intermediary layer of software such as Estonia's X-road system. This protects citizens by stopping databases blending information about an individual while allowing any other system to be plumbed in. POEMs must adopt comparable open-source solutions for this function.

c) Rules Covering Amendment of a Concession

Readiness to absorb failure or significantly changed circumstances will be key to POEMs' stability. Government must be free to terminate a concession if operators prove inadequate or corrupt. This requires clear rules covering any evolution of the concession after it has been awarded.

Key points to watch include:

Code in registry: Aside from the mirror platform, operators must keep a ready-to-go further copy of each iteration of their code in escrow. Under conditions defined in the concession, public authorities can extract this to enable continuation of service if current operators lost their concession.

Independence for franchisees: The core consortium cannot implement any contractual, technological, or operational barriers to any franchisee crossing to a new operating consortium in the event of a change of concession.

Failover obligations for operators: In case of governmental collapse, legislation should make clear operators' priority is protection of users and continuation of service. To take an extreme example, the rules might mandate that operators maintain failover facilities outside the jurisdiction.

Removal of a franchisee: The consortium is entitled to select and oversee their franchisees as in any comparable business relationship. Government cannot decide who wins a franchise or sanctions for underperformance.

Preparation for concession end: Operators must evidence plans for smooth handover of data and functions to an alternative concession holder, either at the end of their period or earlier in case of failure to comply with obligations. Government should own the system's brand which it can transfer to another operator when a concession ends.

End-of-concession risks: Risks of system manipulation exacerbate at the end of a concession period. Operators might start seeing their licence as a cash cow to be milked with blizzards of "buy now" pop ups for example. Attention rents, mandated towards the end of a concession particularly, could be one solution. Externalities are avoided as operators pay their users for any unnecessary inconveniencing.

4) External Platforms as a Counterweight

A concession should stipulate that POEMs can be accessed by any externally operated platform (web, mobile, or future technologies) as any user wishes. This maximizes choice and innovation for users wanting to tap into their regional markets system but wishing to bypass stodginess or lack of convenience stemming from POEMs' need to maintain neutrality, transparency and caution within checks & balances.

a) Examples of Interfacing with External Apps

Any POEMs user must be free to allow some or all of their interactions to also flow through another platform. That app can provide additional content, filtering, structures for whatever charges it wishes.

Examples of models for interaction:

Availability Link: A work-seeker who uses POEMs but enjoys driving Uber can choose to open their times of availability for work and record of bookings in POEMs to Uber. If Uber chose to interface with POEMs, they can direct bookings to the work-seeker through POEMs, blocking the person's availability on POEMs for the duration of that journey.

Additional Checks: A family may wish to book Catholic babysitters. POEMs can of course have an "I identify as a Catholic" tickbox for buyers or sellers and allow filtering on that criteria for any transaction. But it can't verify someone is active and in good standing with the church. An app run by a religious organization may see opportunity in adding this layer of assessment based perhaps on phone interviews. It then uses POEMs to handle purchasing, micro-insurance, and re-assignment of failed bookings while charging an annual subscription fee to users.

Subjectivity: POEMs cannot elevate one seller above others except through transparent objective rules. A trading record in POEMs is akin to a driving licence; an objective statement of good behaviour not an emotional evaluation. Multiple services allowing buyers and sellers on POEMs to rate each other could emerge, perhaps opting to fund through advertising.

Data Blending: POEMs can pull in external data to help its users, but only from neutral authorities. This creates opportunity for external systems offering less authoritative information that some users may prefer. Example: an app for farmers that combines experts' assessments of harvesting conditions with POEMs' feed showing availability and pricing of harvesting equipment and labor rental to plot optimal times to cut any given field. The external provider might charge equipment renters to have their POEMs' listings shown in-app.

Gamification: A youth employment charity may set up an app operating a league of their service users competing to get most work bookings on POEMs each month. POEMs' operators have no incentive to offer such services.

Incorporation: A corporate internal market for services may pull POEMs into their tabs for top-up staffing or hire of vehicles, knowing their company account on POEMs had been preset with their requirements and permission-to-spend levels for individual employees.

b) Why Mandate Interaction with External Systems?

Maximizing POEMs' economic usefulness while keeping operators on their toes justifies allowing an eco-system of providers to offer additional digital marketplace services.

Some specific benefits:

Choice: POEMs will be regulated with the aim of shaping a dependable, trustworthy, public utility unthinkingly relied on for daily life. This will inevitably limit operators' ability to experiment with edgier technologies, offer functionality - such as subjective ratings or advertising driven services - which would breach its neutrality obligations, or innovate around business models. Some users will want a less utilitarian service overlying POEMs' solidity.

Resilience: POEMs' operators may fail or become complacent. By forcing them to allow other operators to interface, users develop other places to go if the main system is not meeting their needs. If, for instance, POEMs is lacklustre with operators lazily relying on their officially-bestowed benefits for revenue rather than growing possibilities in the micro-economy, external platforms would be incentivized to start collaborating; knitting their services together to create a comprehensive, seamless, alternative ultimately with its own transaction engine to which POEMs' users could be invited to shift.

Innovation: By offering a very low cost, end-to-end, transaction engine for the jurisdiction, POEMs should remove multiple costs for e-commerce startups. This should encourage new thinking, around the use of A.I. in compiling vacation itineraries as one example, to be trialled by rival players each able to focus on the cutting-edge part of their proposition with the mechanics of purchasing outsourced to POEMs.

c) How Interaction Might Work

To enable anyone to offer an app sitting on top of POEMs, operators could be obligated to provide:

Interfacing Tools: An Application Program Interface enabling access to POEMs' functions and records by other systems. This must include verifiable checks that a user has given permission for interface into all or specified parts of their records on POEMs.

Cross-Registration: Any user wanting to use their POEMs' record to register with any other service can do so easily. An external system wanting to offer its users registration on POEMs should be free to populate POEMs' registration screens for the user with POEMs' validation processes then triggered.

Validation: A user in an external platform who has been switched to interacting through POEMs in any transaction must have this made clear, perhaps through a watermark or icon that the user has previously specified to POEMs, for that part of their interaction.

Directory: POEMs' public displays should include a list of external platforms that currently maintain a connection with POEMs plus a list of those that have done so in the past.

d) Rules of External Integration

App operators are not to get a free ride on POEMs' operators' investment. The system still gets its cut of each purchase.

This relies on key obligations on POEMs' Operators:

No Control: POEMs' operators cannot set any conditions on interfacing other than those determined by legitimate system security or user protection needs. They have no duty to police external platforms other than ensuring any interaction by one of their users through POEMs is clearly shown as such.

No Charge: External platforms cannot be charged for access to POEMs (beyond having to incorporate the system's normal charges within each transaction). This rules out bespoke services for external platforms, interactions must be through universally accessible interfacing.

Vulnerability to Litigation: Concerns from external application operators must be responded to publicly as a first step. External providers have a right to sue if POEMs makes their intended interface unduly challenging for example. Operators' available defences include system security or non-existence of the desired functionality. POEMs' operators have no obligation to create functionality for external apps, only allow them access to functionality it provides to its users.

Excluded Activity: Some parts of POEMs may not permit an external platform to be involved in an interaction. Voting is an obvious candidate; to protect citizens from having their vote captured by an unscrupulous intermediary.

POEMs' operators have rights in respect of interfacing platforms:

Right to Prioritize: POEMs' operators are permitted to neutrally ranked external linkages and queue requests based on, for example, giving priority to applications with the highest number of users interacting the previous day. The intention is to thwart denial of service attacks, or apps that request processing-intensive market data rather than revenue generating purchases.

Right to Report: As part of their system monitoring, operators will need to evaluate how many transactions are coming from each external platform. Pursuant to their open data obligations, this information must be publicly available. The directory of linked applications is an obvious place to display patterns of usage for each external application.

e) An Innovation Buy-out Formula

There is a scenario unique to public utility e-markets that should be anticipated in enabling legislation: an external platform has invented functionality that works on top of POEMs basic functions, seeing its success POEMs' operators want to incorporate that facility into their basic service for users. As illustration, imagine a small company has developed a way to create improved 3D images of offerings in POEMs' listings of meeting rooms available to rent.

Outside of POEMs, when a dominant platform operator wants to replicate a small provider's functionality, they develop their own version of the software or acquire the startup, paying for the customer base and the technology. But in the case of POEMs, the userbase will be with the big platform already. Balancing the interests of the external inventor with the desire for a fully functioning basic POEMs service for all users is a political judgement.

Options for maintaining this balance include:

No Rules: POEMs' operators could be free to just reverse engineer any improved functionality they see in the array of external platforms drawing on their core system's functions. This would dramatically disincentivize external innovation.

Floating Payment: Operators could be compelled to negotiate a price for external software they want to incorporate into the main platform. This could become complex if more than one external application develops the same functionality and POEMs' operators did not want the actual software of any of them, they wished to rewrite the code for their servers.

Fixed Rate: A formula could be enshrined in enabling legislation governing pay out to an external platform based on number of users of the functionality or frequency of usage. But this underprices the future potential of an invention: POEMs' operators would be incentivized to snap up emerging technologies before they built usage and refined their product.

Micro-patents: A low-cost, easily accessible, form of patenting pertaining only to POEMs in a particular jurisdiction could be offered as part of the public service obligations around POEMs. The rules of this might be:
- POEMs-patent assessments: Anyone can pay to file a micro-patent application that takes aspects of POEMs' functionality and details further functions to be performed on top of that. As with normal patents, independent assessors in the nation's intellectual property agency must be satisfied the application is (a) new, not already covered in disclosures or working software by POEMs' operators or anyone else (b) substantial (c) realizable (d) useful. Successful applications are published openly.
- Patent enforcement: Once issued with a POEMs-patent, the inventor can stop others, including POEMs' operators - offering that functionality. This would extend for a fixed period, perhaps 10 years, allowing them to either grow a business or competitively sell their invention to anyone else, including POEMs' operators.
- Operator disclosures: Operators can disclose their intended functionality for any app reliant on POEMs. This must be in sufficient detail for others to build further functions on top of the planned software.

As in established patenting, POEMs' specific micro-patents should drive innovation around the platform; encouraging inventors to devise enhancements and, as their applications are made public, creating foundations for additional embellishments by others.

Additionally, operators would be incentivized to rapidly disclose plans and set standards for interactions to avoid someone else creating an obstructive micro-patent. For example, POEMs' operators may envisage a device that could be installed in trucks selling loadspace that signaled to drivers when they were parking close to another vehicle which POEMs has arranged to take all or part of their load onwards. POEMs' operators have minimal incentive to design such a device, they are not permitted to earn from hardware sales. By formally disclosing a standard, POEMs' operators could spur companies to create the kit required with proprietary ownership of standards made impossible by disclosure.

This page is excerpted from a lengthier research brief: "Neutrality, Transparency, Checks & Balances. Click on the contents below to read, or download it as a pdf.

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