Oh, yeah. Let me recorded. Yeah. We're we're we're we're live. Hi. My name is Nathan, Nathan Hewitt, and I'm I'm stepping in for Val, our community lead here at MediGov to do this little intro and with Nitin, hold the space. We're so excited for today's speaker, but before we get to it, I wanted to share a little bit more about the space itself and the the cadence of its of this gathering. The so this is a weekly event at MediGov. And if you don't know what MediGov is, we're a digital governance lab in short. And this space features discussions on online governance and related topics with different researchers and practitioners. Today's seminar, like all of our seminars, was proposed in our Slack in the Medigov seminar Slack channel. I'll share some info about how to propose and so on in the chat a little bit later when I'm not talking. Any case you wanna propose one yourself, it's an ongoing process. It's I mean, the lead time isn't super, super long. Like, if you have an idea, it's we could have it here within, like, the near future. We could get one of your seminars in this space, and we definitely welcome your input. I also have a couple announcements that Val passed to me to share with you. One is there is a community call on Thursday about digital twins. I'll put a link in the chat, but it's at noon this the same time, noon eastern, tomorrow. Tomorrow's Thursday. And so, that's gonna be really interesting. I'll put a link in the chat. We do have applications open for our governor our govern governable spacemakers fellowship, a new fellowship we're hosting, and submissions are due on January 20. And, yeah, we're gonna be also as we have in past years, we will be present at ETHDenver. And if you want to connect about that, in our Slack, there's the IRL events channel where you can connect and share your plans and where we'll be sharing about, you know, activities we'll be doing. I think that's all I wanted to share in the kind of preamble. And so, b, I would love to pass it to you to introduce our speaker and hold the space for the, like, talk and discussion.

Thanks very much, Pee. Really good to be here, and to to meet you all. Most of my life is spent in project management, so you're quite an August circle to to to present to, but I I hope I won't disappoint. So very briefly, as as Pee said, this is all about the mod what we call the modern market space, and that is the world of buying. What we're interested in is selling online. People who sell things online because there is a gulf in the governance of these new markets. And we've done a lot of work over many years on how to address that gulf. It's getting quite exciting. We're currently implementing small scale versions of this work with government bodies, but there's a real timeliness about it after events in November in America. So just to set the scene, this is all about the new plumbing of economies around the world. Thirty years ago, as we know, if you wanted to sell something, you had a whole diverse range of tools. You do it from open outcry in old fashioned stock markets, retail, classified, phoning, people who might buy it. And that has largely been supplanted by this new era of online platforms. And there's thousands of them. Many of the most potent ones are out of sight. And because these platforms offered convenience and cheapness or the perception of cheapness for buyers, the buyers migrated to the platforms, The sellers of whatever it was had to follow. And I'm talking about markets for labor, for finance, for goods, for services, for all the essentials of life. And what we set out to do was quantify, first of all, what does a good e market look like? So the first thing to say is we rate these markets by what they do for sellers. Cool new ways to buy stuff. Don't pay anyone's bills. Always focus on what does it do for whoever is selling in the market. And we use five metrics to assess any e market platform. And until five, ten years ago, this list would have been completely theoretical. No market in the physical era, for instance, could serve, could allow a seller to access a 100% of buyers. But you actually can do that in the digital era. And I'll very briefly, in a moment, introduce you to a a set of markets where that all but does happen. So evaluate any e platform where people might go to sell anything, their labor, financial services, whatever, to earn on these metrics. And you quickly realize there's a heck of a gap out there. So at the top of market economies, Wall Street has gained the most incredibly sophisticated, low charge, proactive opportunity seeking, deep broad markets imaginable. If you want to put a $100,000,000 of government bonds into the market right now, you would do it in with an efficiency and low risk and low trading costs that would have been unimaginable two decades ago. And key to that is that Wall Street sellers asked governments to provide underpinning for these potent new markets, and government's obliged. There's a whole array of official bodies that underpin these markets, and they do a really good job at keeping the markets transparent, safe to use, fair, equitable, and so on. Now come down to the bottom of the economy. Instead of thinking about someone who wants to sell a $100,000,000 worth of bonds, think about somebody who wants to sell four hours of work this afternoon. She's got four hours before she has to pick up the kids from school. And I'm not interested in high skilled people if you're an architect, a lawyer, a consultant, a designer. This revolution in new markets is pretty liberating. I'm really interested in the blue collar workforce, the people who work in huge sectors like hospitality, retail, building, care, distribution, janitorial security. And they are increasingly selling their time through a type of market that's broadly out of sight called a workforce scheduling tool. And this is the best selling of them, Kronos w c eight. It's marketed to corporate finance directors with slogans like manage your workforce without limits, and it absolutely allows them to do that. If you are a corporate employee these days, you are unlikely to have regular hours and pay. You are much more likely to be waiting for a text from Kronos to see if you're going into work today, and you'll get another text telling you when it's time to go home. And these markets are the opposite in governments because operators of the gig work platforms, the workforce sharing tools fought tooth and nail against government involvement. Their entire business models are predicated on building large pools of commoditized, cheapened, controllable labor. And they mount very expensive initiatives to overturn laws that are designed to curtail their activities. So that is The Gulf. These hugely, almost inconceivably efficient, attractive markets at the top of the economy and these, wild west of sort of opaque algorithms and aggressive operators constantly needing to drive down labor costs at the bottom. And this Gulf has real world impacts. So if we look at the last twenty five years, the era in which this transition happened from traditional markets to platforms, one of the cornerstones is financialization. Wall Street's new markets are so efficient when you've got something to sell. Why would you sell it any other way? So more and more of the economy has been sucked into financialization. A lot of it completely socially purposeless. It's just financial speculation. And what's happened at the bottom as the new era of e markets came in because in at both the top and the bottom, there's been deregulation, there's been globalization, relaxing of rules, and so on. But for sellers at the bottom, this is The US Job Quality Index. It measures all private sector employment in The US. Again, everything I say refers to blue collar. And the dark purple is what's classed as a low quality job. One way you don't know what you'll be paid, what you what hours you'll be called into work next week, and the pink is traditional. Yeah. I I know my hours for the next few months. So that underpins a lot of the rage that is now sweeping through world politics. There is direct correlation between political extremism, financial insecurity, and precarious work. The OECD counts precarious work as the biggest cause of inequality anywhere in the world. And you can track it back to this this gulf in the types of markets that are now available. And I just thought I should shut up there because we all know how irritating a British accent can be. Does that make sense so far? Seeing nodding, is it okay to continue, or does anyone want to sort of, you know, give that a good kicking? Okay. So I just keep going. Alright, Bee. I I see you nodding. I'm sorry.

Sorry?

Okay.

I absolutely have, Steve. There's some very good ones. I I was very involved with Locanomics in San Francisco before they went bust. Broadly, they're doing some good work. It's too small scale. They cannot compete with the likes of, to take one example, Uber. So you will be familiar with Juno, which started out as cooperative and was crushed. I can't remember off the top of my head. I mean, up and go survives, but it's niche. It's house cleaners in New York. We're about a new form of plumbing that enables co ops and so on. We're just the plumbing guys. We're not a particular model. It's like the road guys. You know, it's they serve bus operators, truck operators. They just make sure the roads work. We're the same. So I'm all for cooperatives. They do great work, but my god, they've got an uphill battle. And I'm very happy to share a briefing we've done on this. There's all the different ways that some very bright, resourceful people have set out to try and combat these evil markets that Silicon Valley has built. And I don't want us to get sidetracked, but anyone who thinks Uber and DoorDash and TaskRabbit and so on are benevolent labor markets really has missed missed the memo. So the short answer is, Steve, yeah, we see them as as as a good initiative that needs infrastructure because at the moment, the bad guys control the infrastructure. They're they're accreting all the money, the power. They're running these opaque algorithms that systemically undermine attempts to thwart their business model. Okay to keep going? I see Bean nodding. Okay. So, obviously, don't wanna waste your time just talking about a problem. What we're very interested in is the solution. And right now I need a solution to a slight change not working. So we see the solution as not being endless whack a mole attempts to make Silicon Valley play nice. Long story short, it's not working. What we're really interested in is the power of government to initiate an alternative plumbing for people to use as they wish, if they wish. And this has happened in the past of course. Every so often about once a generation of technology comes along that needs and merits government to initiate a version of it. So my favorite example is from the eighteen thirties in Britain when pumping was red hot technology and all sorts of companies would sell wealthy households engines to pump water from the river and some companies set up to pump water from the river and pump it into wealthy neighborhoods. And then a bunch of people started saying, well, actually, we could use this exciting new technology to pump water twenty four seven to everyone. And it could be clean water, not dirty river water. But to do that, we need coordinated reservoirs, and only government can create them because we're gonna have to evict people from their houses in valleys and flood the valleys. And we're gonna have to jail people who dump sewage in designated water courses. 1848, Public Health Act in Britain initiated that. It gave local authorities the power to create public water supplies. Every country in the world followed, and of course that's been the case with I mean not the case of Britain taking the lead, but the case that government initiated a public utility version for electricity, roads, rail, telephony, broadcasting, all sorts of technologies. And these public utilities are broadly popular. We don't have to use them. If you don't like the one size fits all voltage from your nation's domestic electricity supply, buy a home generator. But broadly, we do use the public option, and they have driven societal progress, economic growth, and individual opportunity around the world. So our work is all about adding a new facility to this list that government takes for granted. And that new facility we define as modern infrastructure for pursuing your economic potential. And we make this claim with some confidence because if you look at all these technologies that merited and it's only been a handful of technologies that have that have been invented that have merited public option being created. They meet two criteria. It's not just any random tech. It has to do something that we expect from government. So to bring that up to date, social media does not merit a public utility version. We don't expect governments to provide us with places to meet and consume adverts and so on. Secondly, the tech in all these cases has needed unique facilities. Only government could create reservoirs. Only government can use its forcible planning rights to create coordinated roads and so on. Coming right up to date, it annoys the heck out of me that I can't watch Apple's White Lotus through my Netflix account, but government's not gonna solve that for me. Government has no clout as a buyer or seller of entertainment. It's just the regulator. But if you look at modern markets, we absolutely expect governments to run growing, healthy, vibrant, inclusive, innovative economies. We absolutely do have huge leverage in government. Government is the biggest buyer of blue collar labor in any economy in aggregate. So it passes the test. How do you unlock this? In the current political climate, how does government say, yeah. We want everyone to have access to the best possible market infrastructure now in which they can pursue and develop their economic potential. We think the answer is a concession like the ones that create state or national lotteries. So broadly, government says, here's a list of all the facilities we could usefully, uniquely give to a new system of e markets. These five points are the the the headliners. And government says for the next fifteen, maybe, years, we're going to give these benefits exclusively to one consortium that will build us a system of e markets that they run for the benefit of our citizens and small businesses. And they're not gonna get this for free. And you know we will channel overwhelming amounts of public spending into communities through the new markets. We will allow them to interface into all our official databases with each user's permission. But in return, this consortium that wins our concession and gets all those benefits uniquely for fifteen years is gonna have to comply with a lot of obligations. The headline, they're gonna have to fund everything. The whole thing. And that's not just to make it all palatable. It's because you want these markets to be passed in the checks and balances of a democratized society, and that means government that it has to be independent from government. You force decentralization. You force a focus on small transactions. I won't go down this particular rabbit hole. It's really quite nuanced. So you run the concession and then like a state lottery, there's a winner, government gets out of the way and they've got fifteen years to, frankly, unleash a whole set of new markets that hopefully will massively expand economic activity at the base and give people choices. You know, if you want to drive, sell your labor through Uber, do so. If you wanna do it through the public system, which we call POIMS, do that. Do it as well. It's up to you. It's just there to use as you want, but it will build a markup into the cost that the charge for anything you sell. And I should have explained that we propose that the winner of the concession is the consortium that will do it for the lowest possible markup. So this is a crucial point in the governance structure of these markets. They are run, funded, designed by a consortium that won in competitive bidding a transparent concession. That is their legit legitimacy and they there should be no caps on their ability to earn as much as they can generate by growing the micro economy in the jurisdiction. I won't go into what everything poems can do. It's it's frankly gobsmacking. It's way way beyond anything we have now. There's a huge amount of nuance behind this, of course, and this is where I'd really be interested in feedback from this group because it's not our natural area of expertise. These sort of finer points of government governance, that hasn't stopped us having a shot at producing briefings for think tanks and policymakers about all the sort of aspects of this that needs to be thought through in the legislation that triggers the whole thing. But it's doable. I mean I'd I'd welcome you kicking the tires, but we're not saying this would be perfect. We're saying it would be a genuine alternative to what's out there now, which is largely terrible. It would enable all sorts of other things. To come back to Steve's point very briefly, one of the things we are absolutely clear on is that the only people who cannot buy, sell, or take a position in any of these markets are the people who operate them. In other words, the court consortium's entire plan it has to be about empowering other people to sell, to set their own prices. All the diseases you associate with these e markets of today, You have to rule them out in the legislation. And you know, we think this is highly palatable now because this has always been perceived as a sort of competitor to policy initiatives like universal basic income, federal jobs guarantees, baby bonds, degrowth, green new deals. I don't think many people believe that, for example, an incoming Trump administration has universal basic income very high on its agenda. But the idea that, oh, this is no cost. It expands everyone's choices. The risks are taken by the by the shareholders in the consortium, And we can use these markets to drive our economic agenda through legislation because, of course, it has to follow the law. We think it might be quite a timely argument. And now we'll shut up because you've had enough British accent.

Okay. Very quickly, if I may, a point taken on social media. And I'm sorry. I may have misspoken. I'm absolutely not arguing that government has no business regulating social media. I'm saying that the idea that government should set up a social media platform as a regulated public utility is probably a bit of a stretch. I actually was a producer and anchor for the BBC for years, so I'm all for government initiated broadcasting, but I suspect a government run equivalent of Facebook would be widely distrusted and seen as overreach. It I I may be wrong. It's not our area of expertise. We certainly don't advocate that, but I could see an argument for someone else to do so. We're just the market's plumbing guys. On the government competency, I agree. It's absolutely horrendous. Just we have to start from the assumption that they are hopelessly incompetent. That would be priced into the concession. So imagine I'm just gonna take a country at random. Imagine for the sake of argument, India said we've got the Aadhaar system of identity management. We've got the payment stack. We want to go the whole hog. We just want our citizens to have an entire market system as well, and we invite consortia to bid to run that for us. I, as a consortia, have to decide, well, what would I need to charge on each transaction in an Indian market to get my return? And I might say 2%, but b might say, actually, I'm more confident that I can deliver for the Indian government. I'll I'll do it at 1.5%. So b wins the concession. So you have to separate what we call the market initiating authority, which is government, and the market operating consortium, which is a for profit entity that is hemmed in by by the rules that it has taken on in in return for the obligations that is sorry, from the facilities it's gained from government. If the consortia believe government is going to interfere and be incompetent and get in the way, then they will charge more in that territory. And what you want in an ideal world is complete transparency whereas a citizen of a country where the cheapest consortium will only give me these markets for 5% of what I earn, and I'm pointing to somewhere like perhaps Germany where they're getting 1%, I'm gonna want to vote out the government that is causing the 5%.

No. I think my insight tracks. Thank you, though. I am adding something else in the chat, but I wanna leave it to the people who have their hands up tonight.

If I could respond very quickly. I'm I'm sorry. I do use the term digital public infrastructure. We do define this as DPI. I've been very encouraged by the emergence of so many central bank digital currencies. You know, who thought at the height of the Bitcoin hype that government will one day say, well, we're gonna offer you an alternative to Bitcoin. If you want crypto, we'll give you crypto. But it'll be regulated and and everything, and you choose. Have a Bitcoin wallet, have a a Apple wallet, have both. So, yeah, we absolutely do see it as DPI, but we're absolutely clear government should not design, run, or fund it.

Yeah. Point taken. Thank you, Alex. First of all, the reason we believe it should be a for profit entity and just to be clear, we're a nonprofit. We want to be the Linux foundation of this world of sort of hyper efficient huge scale official markets. We're very happy for other people to make a lot of money out of it. The reasons we believe it should be for profit are three. One, it requires vast sums of risk capital. You know, this isn't just a website. I I haven't got I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of all the things these markets could do, but they're not cheap. And you have to limit it to low value transactions. You cannot give all this government backing to people who are gonna go and use them to sell property and office buildings and super yachts. You've got to you they've got to use it to rent bicycles and so on. So the the you need the risk capital. Secondly, it's the predictability of for profit. You know, you don't want ideal ideologies running these markets. Look at the way, for instance, Walmart went through a phase of not selling contraceptive pills. That's utterly unacceptable. You it's just they've got to be predictable. The people who run it must be trying to maximize their return, and the only way they can do that is to grow activity in the jurisdictions microeconomy. So it's predictable. They may make mistakes. They may somehow, you know, do an equivalent to the Google dance where someone suddenly finds that they're slightly marginalized. So long as they their motivation was transparent, that gives you a kind of solidity. And I just wanna clear up the idea that for profit is synonymous with owning. One of the things we're very big on is decent forced decentralization. So very quickly you do not allow the consortium that wins to operate any front end interface with users. They can only do that through independent franchisees. So the consortium creates it's the McDonald's model. Yeah. The consortium creates a kit of parts. I'm the franchisee for, let's say, the market for bus drivers. I take the kit of parts. I build the market. I go out and sell to everybody who buys bus drivers every channel that might market this to people who want to do bus driving or could do bus driving. I make sure I'm interfaced into the licensing authority for bus drivers, and I'm getting a cut of the 2% the market is charging that I negotiate with the consortia. I can't be allowed to dominate the market for bus driving once it gets beyond a certain size. I have to sell off part of my franchise to another franchisee who pays me whatever the market will dictate. So you're constantly breaking the power down. So the broad principle is anyone who comes in to build and fund these markets, we have no problem with them earning whatever that they're worth in terms of growing microeconomic activity. We have a real problem with them aggregating power, and we constantly force breaking down the structures. So this isn't going to appeal to companies like Google that are all about, you know, huge pots of data and ownership of data. It's going to appeal to the kind of companies like Accenture, maybe an Oracle, the companies that handle vast amounts of data just as a service. They don't own the data. They don't monetize it. They don't ask it. It's it's owned by someone else. And in our case, it's owned by the public. Does that answer your question, Alex? Okay.

Okay.

I'm I'm curious to know how far this has been developed. I don't get a sense whether this is conceptual prototype. That's one question. But the other critical variable, given this is a meta governance group, is what is the what's the best resource that describes the poem governance that would enable this to work with high fidelity, transparent accountability that the public would trust? By the way, my accent is no my accent is no longer taken to be English when I go back to England. So and I'm in Charlotte, North Carolina, by the way.

But you're English?

Well, the accent, it's a bit more I'm half and half, actually.

Oh, okay.

I was I was educated there.

Okay. I'd never have guessed. I mean, that's a compliment. So so how far along are we? This work actually started in 1995 back at the Demos UK think tank with a group that was instigated of technologists and policy people to ask this question. We are clearly going to have an era of online markets before long. How do we make sure they really really work for people at the bottom of the economy? And long story short, there are a couple of books and policy papers, but it was all just drowned by the first.com boom. Yes. And it was all just sidelined. Yeah. It is now hardwired into the public mind that Silicon Valley and Wall Street will just build the markets they want, and government's job is to kind of play these whack a mole games of trying to solve the resulting problems. However, we shifted focus as a group and moved the whole thing into a nonprofit called MM4A, Modern Markets for All. And we operate small scale markets for public agencies. We've done it for the UK government, and we're now doing it in The US. So our next launch is city of Portland, Oregon. And what we do is a very small part of the vision, which is public markets as an alternative to gig work markets. So the US government spends $10,000,000,000 a year on networks of job centers. Every state workforce agency has an all sectors job matching platform. Then it's taken for granted that government provides equitable inclusive labor market infrastructure. It does nothing for people who can't work regular hours, gig workers, and we're changing that. So it's it's going much slower than we would like. It's much more frustrating than we would like, but we're we have a working platform. It's it's pretty good that I say it myself. So that's all explained at beyondjobs.org. And then the best resource, well, I showed what we call our briefings. You know, we regularly go out and talk to people and say, this is what we're trying to do. We're trying to create the legislation that shapes a genuine public utility that is genuinely unlocking all the possibilities of sophisticated e markets for people who are selling their labor, their household assets, renting their possessions, lending $20 they don't need until Monday. We want to give them the best tools imaginable in one seamless horizontal platform. Tell us if you think our thinking about how you force decentralization works, whether the formula for forcing the operators to focus relentlessly on small commercially unattractive transactions. Have we got that right? And the next step we really want to get to is is getting in front of the international financiers and the big tech players who would be evaluating a come a country that says, yeah, we want to do this, and deciding, alright, what are we going to charge as our percentage of all the microeconomic activity we create? So that's the next step. You know, I'd be the first to admit the world of government covenants isn't our natural home. We do our best. But it's it's all up on the web. We open source everything we do. So anybody who's interested in engaging and and maybe improving on our work, it's certainly not that difficult. We would welcome.

So just in summary, is the best resource to go to is the website, better jobs for all? Is that so that's the best resource?

We we we I'm sorry. We operate for multiple webs

Oh, I see.

We aim. No. It's peep peoplescapitalism.org.

Yeah. I got that one. Yeah.

Our sound bite in the the battle of ideas is people's capitalism. It's a long standing thing came out of the Eisenhower administration. And as you drill down into that, there is a a briefings page. We kind of try and hide the complex people's capitalism and then you you go to the section about how do we what how do you create a public utility version? And there is a briefings page. Mhmm. Cool.

And the where the

detail takes you. Sorry?

Yeah. One of the secondary benefits is the development of social capital as well. It's not just a transactional thing. Oh, absolutely. So yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

And and the the fire hose of data, public data that comes out, very exciting. I mean, again That sounds amazing. I'm I'm trying not to sort of talk about the the thing, the actual utility, what we call POEMS, because I sent you guys a a more, you know, high level.

Yeah. Thank you very much.

Well, very quickly, I'm wary of plunging in with a view on the specific model you're talking about because I'm I may have an erroneous understanding of it. But broadly, the point I always make is we have to shift from this model and the assumptions that Meta and Google and so on have created to what we call a genuine utility mindset. So there is no freemium water supply. Wealthier road users cannot pay to have traffic lights turn green in their favor. They cannot. That's facilities reserved for emergency vehicles. Post offices don't monetize the vast troves of data about us. They transit each day. They're utilities. They just do what they do to serve the public. And, yes, some of them make a lot of money, but it's a steady sort of predictable income stream. We're the same. Just please forget everything that you take for granted in the world that Meta and Google and so on have created. Poems gives its data away to the public. There are three categories of data in poems only. One, anonymized published publicly. You know, what did babysitters earn within five miles of my home on Tuesday evenings over the last three weeks, and how does it compare with what babysitters earned, you know, near where my parents live? Public data, it gives you the graphs. The second category is private personal data. What did I, Wingham, earn as a babysitter over the last month? Nobody can see it unless I choose to release it to them. And the third is is data the system doesn't compile. There is no category of operators only data. Everything is either published or private to a given user. It's completely different from the opaque algorithms and everything you think of today. That's what governance of a public utility does.

Hello. I'm Rob.

Hi, Rob.

I'm working on some hardware distributed web stuff and constantly thinking about how markets operate. And I totally agree that there's, like, enormous opportunity for, like, a new set of market primitives to construct new things. But I'm I'm sort of confused onto government's role in what you're proposing. Mhmm. Like, is the idea that, like, the power in like, the capital power and authority of government primes the pump for, like, a market of vendors to create this system? Like, is it is it like like, are we trying to just create, like, a really good request for vendors with, like, regulations built in instead of slamming the private market with regulations?

Because government's not going to pay for it. So I'm gonna use the British National Lottery as an example because I happen to know it well. So in 1993, the Conservative government said we want a national lottery. We will ensure it has prime time results show on the BBC. We will ensure that all the regulatory hurdles removed and so on. We're gonna take 50% of all the turnover for good, you know, charitable works. We want a consortium to run it, to to fund it, build it, design it, everything within the rules we've set. And a consortium called Camelot won, and government just gets out of the way. Camelot managed to sell a billion £1 tickets in its first eighteen months. It was a huge success precisely because in my view, government got out of the way. So government initiated the national lottery and then got out of the way. It does regulate it, but that's making sure that the consortium running it are adhering to the rules of the concession. And it's the same here. So government says, yep. We're going to pump all the spending we do on nurses, teachers, childcare, public services through these markets into local people who will do the work. We're going to allow interfacing into our databases. So if I go to the markets and say, hey, I'm a truck driver and I wanna sell as a truck driver, it will say, do I have permission to check your record in the driver and vehicle licensing database? And when I give that permission, it confirms that I have a truck driving license. It's gonna promote it. It's gonna promote these markets to tourists, businesses, inward investors, taxpayers, benefits recipients, and so on. It's gonna channel public assistance through these markets and so on. And the operators who win the concession have to be able to sue to get this. If the driver and vehicle licensing authority say, hey. We can't be bothered to interface or some local government says, hey. We're not gonna put out public spending through these markets. Can't be bothered. The operators can sue for it. There are caveats to this. There's always caveats. That's why we write these detailed briefings. But that is broadly it. So anyone can check, and everything's transparent. So one of the requirements is that the code is published openly, that the operators have to run a parallel version of these markets where I can go and set up a fictitious account, and I think it's doing something it shouldn't be. I'll make it do it, capture it, and there you are. That's my scandal. I can access the code. I can see what it's doing. So so long as they're complying with all these rules, the prid quo pro for the the operators is there's no cap on your earnings. It's not gonna be windfall taxes. You just go for it. You grow our micro economy. And so long as you follow the rules we set, you take whatever the return is because you're just growing economic activity up throughout our our base. So that's the importance of governance. You've got to get the rules right before a concession comes in. You mustn't create a loophole they can access. You mustn't give them some unfair advantage where they've got easy money without growing microeconomic activity. But, no, government should not run, fund, or design these markets for all sorts of reasons, not just incompetence.

Sort of. Like, I What's

the scenario you're worried about, Rob?

I'm just, like, imagining you could just put all these rules into, like, a request for a product from, like, the the private industry. Like, you can have these, you can leverage the, like, special databases, like, give special access to data. You can, like, do all these things. So, like, I like, what what what are we what are we building here? Like, it's like, is it is it just, like, pushing this idea out?

You're well, you, government, aren't building anything. You are creating a set of incentives and obligations for private sector players to build a completely new set of markets that are structured from the ground up around unlocking assets and skills and potential from people at the economic base. How they do that is up to them.

Yes. Exactly.

I'm I'm doing that now. Yes. And and just to be clear, can I just close off this point be very quickly? Please don't assume that the legislation contains a spec in the traditional sense, as in this is how it works. What the legislation does is set the principles. So for instance, key principle that this system of markets has to allow anyone who is legally entitled to to buy or sell anything on their own terms. It cannot tell them what they're going to price at. It can only give them data to allow them to decide their price. It's it has to enforce all laws. It has to make it very easy for any seller to have their tax deducted at source. It's that kind of list of this is what it must do, but it's not a spec. I mean, we do we have written a spec just as a kind of sanity test. You know, if we were a commercial outfit that had got this concession had won the concession, what would our spec look like? And it it's very detailed and very, very expensive to build, which is why, you know, to to Rob's point, that's why we believe it has to be it's easiest to do it with a for profit incentive, not because the search for profit is the highest calling of humanity, just it's predictable. It does take big risks, and it's pretty transparent.

I'm doing that.

Thanks. See you, sir.

Thank you very much. It was very kind.

Thanks. Bye, everyone.