# 01 — The standard: five clauses, and the proposal for legislation

The site's anchor page, and the reason everything lives here rather than on a service brand: **this is the recommended subscription model, published as a standard a company can adopt this week, with the law-shaped version as a later artefact for consumer groups and committees.**

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## 1. The principle

> **A subscription is a discount for committing to regular use. It is not rent on something you have the right to ignore.**

*"That sentence does the work of the whole document, and it is the one to put at the top of the site."* It is the tagline of every page — and per the naming discussion, it stays a tagline rather than a name (the abbreviation trap is real: Discount-Not-Rent → DNR).

## 2. The five clauses

Each one a company either meets or does not, **each observable from outside** — which is *"the property that makes this a standard rather than a pledge."*

| # | Clause | Observable how |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | **We can tell you how much you used it** | Ask, and see |
| 2 | **We tell you without you having to ask** | Do usage summaries arrive? |
| 3 | **Leaving is as easy as joining, by the same route** | Testable in a browser, without their cooperation |
| 4 | **If you stop using it, we tell you before we charge you again** | Observable over one renewal cycle |
| 5 | **We do not charge for a period you could not have used** | Outages, suspensions, lockouts |

The corpus discipline behind the design: *"a dated test somebody else can repeat is evidence, and an assertion is marketing. A code of conduct whose clauses cannot be checked is the second thing."*

## 3. The standard-before-law sequencing

*"Draft it as a standard rather than as legislation, because a standard can be adopted by one company next week and a law cannot be adopted by anybody."*

So the page ships in three layers:

1. **The standard** — the five clauses, adoptable unilaterally, with a public adopters list (empty at launch, honestly).
2. **The conformance route** — how a company declares adoption: **a published policy page**, which the register accepts as an answer (the reflexivity fix: answering becomes a one-time cost).
3. **The draft law** — the same five clauses re-expressed as obligations, written later, explicitly labelled as a proposal, with the spring-2027 regime mapped beside it showing what it covers and what the five clauses add.

Layer 3 is where the site's ambition lives, and it has an unusually strong position: by the time the 2027 regime lands, the site will hold a year of register data showing which clauses companies already meet voluntarily — **evidence for the legislative proposal generated by the register itself.**

## 4. The maturity model — four axes, one needing no cooperation

| Axis | The question | Observed how |
|---|---|---|
| **Knows** | Can they tell you what you used? | Ask |
| **Tells** | Do they tell you before charging you again? | Watch one renewal cycle |
| **Speed** | Days from asking to a substantive answer | Measured |
| **Exit** | Is leaving as easy as joining, by the same route? | **A browser, no contact required** |

**Exit is built first** — click counts and routes for fifty companies, dated, method published so anyone can re-run it. *"It is measured rather than reported, so no company can decline to participate in it."* It follows the reproducible-test discipline of the 16 August comparison-pages brief, and it is the register's credibility deposit: a complete artefact before a single letter is sent.

## 5. What the standard is not

Not a scoreboard (no scores exist anywhere in the design) · not a pledge (every clause is externally checkable) · not the 2027 regime restated (three of the five clauses go beyond it — that delta is the legislative argument) · and not dependent on anyone's cooperation to start (clause 3 and the exit axis are measurable today, unilaterally).

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This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).