The standard: five clauses, and the proposal for legislation
Summary
The anchor document for /standard/. It gives the front-page principle its full weight — a subscription is a discount for committing to regular use, not rent on something you have the right to ignore — and derives five clauses from it, each one a company either meets or does not, and each observable from outside: it can tell you how much you used it, it tells you without being asked, leaving is as easy as joining, it warns before renewal once you stop using it, and it never charges for a period you could not use. It argues for publishing the standard before the law — a standard can be adopted by one company next week and a law cannot be adopted by anybody — with the draft law reserved as a later artefact for consumer groups and committees, explicitly labelled a proposal rather than an enacted text. A four-axis maturity model follows: knows, tells, speed, and exit — the last needing no cooperation at all, which is why it is built first.
Key concepts
Key ideas
- Every clause is checkable by somebody other than the company — the property that makes it a standard rather than a pledge.
- A published policy page is accepted as conformance — answering becomes a one-time cost.
- Not a scoreboard: no scores exist anywhere in the design.
- Three of the five clauses go beyond the spring-2027 regime — that delta is the legislative argument.
On this site
Published as /standard/, in full, with the adopters list started empty rather than seeded with sympathetic friends.