What is Property and Contract (⿻ property)?

When you rent out a house, the tenant receives only the right to live in it; the rights to sell it and to collect rent stay with the landlord. Ownership, in other words, can be split up and shared. The book *Plurality* proposes extending this idea to digital assets such as computing power and data.

Your computer and your phone sit idle for most of the day. Meanwhile, data and computing power are concentrated in the data centers of a handful of large companies. The chapter "Property and Contract" in the book ⿻ Plurality asks whether digital assets like these could be shared, used and managed jointly by many people and groups.

In short

When you rent out a house, the tenant receives only the right to live in it. The right to sell it and the right to collect rent stay with the landlord. In this way, ownership can be divided into several parts and shared [1].

The book proposes extending this way of thinking to digital assets such as computing power and data. The vision is that many people and groups, rather than a few giant companies, could use and manage them together through open systems [2].

For example

IPFS, distributed storage. Among the systems for sharing storage, the book writes, the closest to an open standard is the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS stores files not in one place but spread across many computers, and was pioneered by Juan Benet and his Protocol Labs. The book notes that it is used by governments facing strong adversaries, such as Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs [3]. Chapter 4-5 writes that the Taiwanese government adopted IPFS for its websites, to make them resilient against attacks that flood servers with traffic (DDoS attacks) [4]. → digital public infrastructure

Radio spectrum and domain names. Licenses to broadcast on radio frequencies were long treated much like private property. But uses that many can share, such as WiFi, appeared. And when broadcast frequencies were to be moved over to 5G, holders of old licenses could hold out and block the reorganization. Regulators in the United States changed the system so that holdouts could be relocated through auctions [5].

On domain names (internet addresses like example.com), the book offers this analysis: in practice, the combination of search engines' judgments about which pages to rank highly and real-time auctions for advertising works as a de facto property system. This, the book says, is "a far cry from traditional property systems" [5].

Self-assessment of land in Taiwan. One idea is to have owners declare the value of their own property, and oblige them to sell at that price. The book writes that this has long been used for land in Taiwan [6]. It is covered in more detail in the article on the Harberger tax.

In more detail

Large-scale cooperation is built on pooling assets

Chapter 4-4 of the book writes that much of today's large-scale cooperation rests on pooling assets into "legal persons" such as companies, unions and religious bodies. Its foundation is contracts, which set out how the assets are divided [2].

The sharing of computation, storage and data was also the central purpose of the "Intergalactic Computer Network" envisioned by J. C. R. Licklider, who led computer research at ARPA, the research agency of the US Department of Defense (→ The Lost Dao). According to the book, the cloud and the training data of AI have realized part of this. But they are held by a few companies in a few countries, and the dream of sharing assets widely and horizontally across the network remains a dream, the book says [2].

The cloud as a return to the mainframe

According to the book, most chips sit unused inside personal devices, and data is locked away in "silos" belonging to separate organizations and countries [3].

The top two cloud providers hold nearly two-thirds of the market. Their advantages come mainly from cheaper data centers, not from users sharing resources with one another. The book sees this as a return to the era when everyone connected to a single large mainframe computer [3].

Ownership can be divided, but data makes it hard

Legal scholars describe three attributes of property [1]:

"usus" (the right to use something)
"abusus" (the right to alter or dispose of it)
"fructus" (the right to the value it creates)

A rental transfers only usus. A company hands out usus to its employees, abusus to its managers and fructus to its shareholders [1].

With data, though, the simplest ways of granting usus also hand over abusus and fructus. The book writes that many people who published data later taken up by AI did not fully understand what that meant [1].

Data is also social from the start, lying between people. So, the book says, privacy laws and cryptographic stopgaps that treat it as a matter of individual rights do not fit [1]. → contextual integrity

Contracts have limits as well. Contracts are inherently incomplete, supported by custom and past court rulings. For data, whose possible uses are countless, it is impossible to list and negotiate over every future use, the book writes [7].

Four layers of ⿻ property

The book lists four layers that make up ⿻ property [8]:

Standards. Commitments on performance and security when sharing computing resources: the equivalent of encrypted web connections (HTTPS).
Technologies for computing together. Such as cryptographic techniques for computing jointly without showing each other the inputs.
Technologies on the output side. Techniques that stop individuals from being identified from results, digital watermarks, and techniques for tracing which data a result came from.
The organizational and social side. Organizations that collectively represent the people the data is about: data trusts, cooperatives and "mediators of individual data", among others. This includes rules that stop a member from disclosing data unilaterally (the equivalent of prohibitions against strikebreaking in unions).

The organizational side is covered in more detail in the article on data dignity.

Toward partial common ownership

In chapter 5-7, "Social Markets", the book introduces "partial common ownership": a tax on a self-assessed value, with an obligation to sell at that price [6].

The book goes on to sketch the possibility of combining this with voting mechanisms. Much of the value that wealth creates would be returned to overlapping publics, and communities would also be given rights of use and disposal. This, the book writes, is what "⿻ property" would look like [9]. In a review, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, sums up that the Harberger tax idea from the authors' earlier book Radical Markets is extended here into arrangements in which several people and groups each partly own an asset at the same time [10].

What is debated

The book's own reservations. The book states plainly that today's systems for spectrum and domain names were designed by experts out of public view, and cannot be called socially legitimate. It notes that the authors themselves have criticized them. Even so, it says they respond inventively to real problems, and offer hints for rethinking real-world property systems such as urban redevelopment and trademarks [5].

Common misunderstandings

It is about abolishing private property. The book's proposal is to divide ownership and share it. It expects future "property" to take a different form from today's private ownership of land and joint-stock companies, while aiming to make it as rooted in common sense and law as "property rights" are today [8]. For criticisms concerning private property, see the article on the Harberger tax.

Where it fits in Plurality

This is the fourth chapter of Part 4 of the book, "Freedom", which is framed by the rights operating system. The book's chapter summary puts it this way: "To take on ambitious collaborations, associations must be able to commonly manage shared digital assets like data, computation, and storage using open protocols" [11].

The previous chapter, "Commerce and Trust", had signaled that trust and credit are a premise for the joint use of computation and data [12]. This chapter deals with the assets themselves. Its discussion of the social nature of data builds on contextual integrity and ⿻ publics. The idea behind search engines' judgments, whether a page is central in the network of links, also connects to ⿻ Voting.

Sources

Plurality, 4-4, section "Impediments to sharing", first half — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-4, introduction after the opening story — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-4, section "The state of sharing" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-5, section "Infrastructures for information integrity" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-5/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-4, section "⿻ real property" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-7, section "Social markets tomorrow", item on partial common ownership — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-4, section "Impediments to sharing", second half — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-4, section "⿻ property" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-7, section "Frontiers of social markets" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/ ［CC0］
Vitalik Buterin, "Plurality philosophy in an incredibly oversized nutshell" (2024-08-21) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html
Plurality, chapter summaries (Chapter 4-4) — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/blob/86158859464aee75633acd854c656928121a7fd8/contents/english/8-blurb.md ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-3, section "Commerce in a ⿻ society" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-3/eng/ ［CC0］

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