UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

Distributive Equity Through Structure: A Community-Scale Worked Example of Values Stickiness

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.5281/zenodo.19600614

Authors

John Stroh

Reported year

2026

Reported language

en

Source type

article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:04:47.751379+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:04:47.751379+00:00

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Documentary abstract — original language

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 to the platform, as legislators of the relationships within their ecosystems, and as contractual actors participating in the transactions they rule on. Adjacent work proposes distributive equity, the fair allocation of welfare across all ecosystem participants, as a candidate additional consideration for antitrust enforcement where those participants are not equally served by traditional competition-law analysis. 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 structural commitments inside the Tractatus framework that generated them — a constitutional architecture grounded in Wittgenstein's sayable / unsayable distinction, Berlin's value pluralism, Ostrom's polycentric governance, Alexander's living-systems principles, and Te Ao Māori frameworks of indigenous data sovereignty — and argues that the overlap between Village's work and the legal-academic research programme on ecosystem power is at the values layer, not only at the structural layer. Both are responses to the same concern: that platform power, left to drift, will be exercised against the welfare of ecosystem participants whose welfare the market does not defend. Section 4 documents the platform's AI substrate as a Situated Language Layer bound by the same constitutional architecture it enables, grounded in the operator's published AI Governance for Communities article series. The author is a single-founder company director, not a legal scholar. The paper's contribution is documentary rather than theoretical: it offers the research programme one primary-source-rich case to assess, critique, extend, or reject. Available editions: English (canonical), Deutsch, Français, Nederlands, and te reo Māori. The Māori edition is machine-translated by DeepL and pending native-speaker review; the other four are primary and machine-translated respectively. Canonical HTML edition: https://agenticgovernance.digital/whitepapers/distributive-equity.html

Identifiers

OPENALEX

W7154509426

DOI

10.5281/zenodo.19600614

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

article

Natural entities mentioned

Ecosystem

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19600614
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W7154509426

Documentary status

Relevance pending

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