Manage rules and permissions, without centralized authority

Decentralized Rulebooks enable the distribution of credentials to manage access to services across the web.

Updated
October 5, 2023


Contributors
Bryce Willem
Mike Harris

Introduction to Rulebooks

Decentralized Rulebooks are a distributed privilege management system. This provides a new model of Internet governance with strong economic incentives for web services to redistribute their centralized governance on to the network.

Ultimately, Rulebooks empower federated web governance.

The Rulebook network manages rules and permissions. Rulebooks are not a platform or a blockchain; they are public documents that anyone can create to set rules, standards, or regulations in any context online.

When someone joins a Rulebook, they get a portable digital credential, which they can use to declare that they follow those rules. These credentials work like keys to access web services and benefits.

Joining a Rulebook can require people to meet specific pre-qualifications, like being licensed in law, or they can be open to anyone to opt-in, like general Terms & Conditions.

If a user breaks a rule, they can lose their access and are subject to penalty when they want to regain it. Rulebooks enable self-regulation, strengthen trust, and empower accountability – even between anonymous users across the web.

1

Verifiable trust signals

Imagine an authenticated "blue tick" (that isn’t owned by billionaires or ginormous companies) for anything that you discover on the web: news, social media posts, companies, AI generated content, etc.

It would be as regular as the padlock icon at the top of your browser indicating you have a secure connection.

This tick increases your trust and confidence in the things you find online. It means that someone can be held accountable to follow specific rules laid out in a publicly accessible Rulebook document.

You can click the tick to read the rules and see who’s managing them.

In this example, you are reading a blog by Alice. Alice has very high standards for her sector. She's publishing investment tips under a Rulebook provided by the Financial Times.

The Financial Times is bound by regulations set by the UK Government's Financial Conduct Authority. Alice chooses to adhere to such high standards in order to establish trust in her work and gain wider reach across web platforms and social media.

If you find that Alice isn't following those standards, you can click on the 'Report' button. Alice's chosen Moderator will be notified (in this case, the Financial Times), and Alice could lose her ability to use that credential and access to those privileges or benefits until she faces accountability.

In addition to user-reporting, Moderators can use their own processes (manual or automated) to ensure rules and standards are maintained.

2

Network roles & incentives

Important to note: Rules, moderation processes, penalties, and incentives are completely up to network administrators to design. Rulebooks are just a protocol that enables verifiable, accountable policies and standards across the web in a uniform way. The protocol integrates seamlessly with any existing systems (both Web2 and Web3).

Here are the key roles within the ecosystem and their incentives to use Rulebooks:

Rulebooks: public documents that define standards in a specific context online.

Incentives: Anyone can create a Rulebook and could be motivated to do so to tackle civic challenges or capture economic opportunities.

Leads: prominent entities that define the Rulebook's broad direction. Leads not only extend and refine the Rulebooks standards, but can launch and promote credible Trust Networks.

Incentives: Leads gain the ability to codify standards and policies online in contexts where accountability are needed. By enabling others to govern, Leads amplify their reputation and credibility, promoting diversity and vouching for Moderators they trust.

Moderators: entities that take a proactive role in governance under their chosen Lead. This role can be established as a business or public service. Moderators are responsible to issue and revoke credentials as well as manage penalty and appeals. Moderators can further interpret and extend the rules defined by the Lead.

Incentives: Moderators offer 'Governace-as-a-service' and would manage user access for web services. As a new service industry, Moderators could be contracted or funded to provide customized and highly effective online governance. In civics, Moderators may be activists, NGOs, or concerned web users who want to elevate underrepresented voices or communities.

Web users: individuals using the Internet. Users can generally be producing or consuming. When producing or publishing content, users can declare their content meets certain, catagorical standards. When consuming or purchasing online, web users can evaluate and filter content by any specific standards they want.

Incentives: For users producing content, they can gain greater reach and immediate trust with their audience. For users consuming content or making purchases, Rulebooks give them greater trust and safety. Users also gain more control over what they encounter online.

Web services: platforms and services. Producing users can use their credentials on the service to categorize and extend the reach of their content. Consuming users can discover and filter content based on specific standards and rules they want.

Incentives: centralized governance is expensive and sub-optimal. Rulebooks enable services to distribute governance responsibilities across the network, unlocking resources to invest into their product/service. Rulebooks and Moderators can be shared between services, enabling a network effect that makes governance cheaper and more efficient than multitude of centralized solutions. Additionally, user accountability reduces the volume of cases to be addressed.

3

Governance structure

Rulebooks enable top-down communication with bottom-up, user-driven governance. The network acts as an open market for competing values, rules, and standards, which users align themselves with to receive credentials.

Here are the dynamics and key relationships between the different roles on the network:

Leads link to a Rulebook; Moderators select Leads they trust and want to moderate under; Leads can accept or decline Moderators, to ensure trust and quality.

Leads can revoke Moderators if they grow misaligned in values or standards. Reciprocally, Moderators can chose to leave their Lead.

This helps ensure that the system remains open to self-correction and adapt to new or changing social values. It's an open market for rules and values to compete, evolve, and gain consensus.

The result is the effective separation of governance from web services. On today's web, web services compete and users become subject to the governance of the winner. This separation enables the web to establish federated governance. It’s key to ensure an equitable, safe, and democratic web for everyone.

4

Example application

To help illustrate the roles in a real-world scenario, here's an example application focusing on global ad regulations.

Rulebook: A Global Advertising Regulation' rulebook is created to manage online ads. The Rulebook specifies broad rules that are compatible with many country's specific regulations.

Leads: In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversees ad standards for truth-in-advertising. The FTC can can interpret and adapt the global standards Rulebook to match US regulations, offering a universally accessible online representation of these rules to anyone who wants to advertise in the US. This shifts the paradigm from merely urging Internet giants to comply with standards to presenting a clear mandate: "Adopt this system, or you can't advertise."

Moderators: Ad agencies are likely to assume this role, given their influence in the advertising sector. Governments could even require agencies to be Moderators as a condition to keep their advertising licenses. Responsibilities would span from issuing credentials to moderating disputes. All these processes can be automated to yield a minimal footprint, ultimately decentralizing this presently centralized process.

Advertisers (producing users): Advertisers join a Moderator in their target advertising country, committing to local policies. They gain a credential that allows them to access that targeting privilege on web platforms. Violations could result in revocation of that privilege and penalties.

Web services: these are platforms like GoogleAds and Facebook. They integrate a Rulebook SDK to verify advertisers privilege to run ads in a target country. This ensures targeted ads adhere to the region’s standards. This significantly simplifies platforms' ongoing work to maintain adherence to all the local regulations around the world. The network of moderators generates a network effect, meaning web services would save significant costs to contract Moderators directly or to pay into a shared pool that's distributed amongst Moderators. This enables platforms to serve as conduits for ethical advertising, bolstering trust in digital ads.

All together, these roles enable a trustworthy ecosystem that respects regional advertising norms and removes the need for countries to rely on private corporations to enforce standards. The outcome? Improved regulatory oversight, better compliance, cost savings, and reinforced global responsibility in the advertising sector.

Frequently asked questions

  • Exonym is presently a for-profit company for two key reasons: 1) Exonym was originally founded as a container for our patent and the system’s IP; 2) it was necessary because of our limited resources (it’s cheaper and faster to found a for-profit company in Germany).

    We intend to become a non-profit as soon as appropriate funding is secured.

  • Exonym makes money through the registration of legal entities and network administrators (Leads and Moderators).

    Registration ensures the authenticity of all entities enacting governance, binds these entities to their local laws, and protects the network from duplicate or clone accounts.

  • Policing and enforcement processes are up to the Moderators on the network. The system has a default feature for users to report abuse. Moderation can leverage any mix of manual, automated, or crowd-sourced processes according to the context.

    Rather, Rulebooks are a tool to augment moderation systems with privilege management and user accountability.

  • This depends on the rate of people joining and being revoked on the network and the moderation system’s configuration. At our current stage, running a node on a typical network that onboards millions of users per day would cost around $50 per month.

    Peak times occur when nodes drop out, users migrate to other nodes, or Rulebooks are redeployed. This bottleneck will be unlocked as Rulebook technology scales to the web. Costs for web-scale administration are to be determined.

  • Any network administrator (Leads and Moderators) is bound to the jurisdiction and laws of their own country.

    Rulebooks are not a platform; they’re an open protocol. Using a Rulebook is like using an SSL certificate. Thus, entities are not bound to the jurisdictions governing Exonym.

    As a service provider, Exonym protects the network from duplicate and clone accounts, so that effective governance is possible. The network is not dependent upon this service to function – only for new entities to join the network. This narrow service Exonym provides is as a German limited liability company (GmbH).

  • Rulebooks are a technology by Exonym. Rulebooks are an open-source framework to establish governance online without centralized authority. This enables a new ecosystem built on security, trust, democratic values.

    Exonym built these tools and also provides a key service to this ecosystem: preventing duplicate and clone accounts to ensure the integrity of the network and that legal entities are who they say they are.

  • While Rulebooks may be created and maintained by central authorities, they are not centralized in nature. Rulebooks open up a market for different models of governance and moderation to emerge, compete, and evolve.

    Users are free to chose or change based on their personal preferences and values. This ensures users are not beholden to a single entity or group, as changing norms will create demand for new standards.

  • Exonym has no centralized power or authority to govern or moderate the ecosystem and has no ability to act as a wrapper around the network.

    This power of governance is fully decentralized and up to the network. Exonym’s role responsibility is limited by design. Entities that want to act as Leads and/or Moderators or verify their authenticity on the web must register with Exonym.

    Registration is necessary to ensure the network remains trustworthy and safe. This prevents duplicate or clone accounts and verifies that entities that want to enact governance are who they say they are. Registration is a standardized transactional service. If you prove you’re a legal entity and pay the one-time fee, you can establish unlimited Leads and Moderators on the network.

    The network is empowered to self-regulate Leads and Moderators. In the beginning, Exonym will create a ‘Trustworthy Leads' Rulebook and act as a Lead and Moderator to ensure baseline standards of trust and safety.

    This governance exists in an open market for improved rules and standards to emerge and generate consensus. We ultimately want all governance to be overseen by the network and will hand over these roles as soon as appropriate entities want to take control of it.

  • Today’s information silos are largely a product of black-box algorithms. Users are extremely limited to control or influence the content presented to them.

    Rulebooks do have the potential to generate echo chambers, but with a critical difference. Users have the ability to filter content that meets their personal preferences and standards, which users can use to create an echo chamber. The difference is that users would have to do this by choice.

    Rulebooks reintroduce human agency and intention into the information ecosystem, effectively flipping black-box echo chambers inside out and making them visible to the network. This marks a first crucial step to addressing information fragmentation and isolation.

  • The network is truly distributed, so there’s no centralized point to focus an effective attack.

    If Exonym was attacked, this would not affect any existing Leads, Moderators, users or services on the network. All transactions would continue as normal as these roles operate completely independently from Exonym. The only impact would be Exonym couldn’t register new users for that time.

    If a Lead or Moderator were attacked, they wouldn’t be able to issue or revoke credentials. Users seeking a credential to access services would be free to get one with any of the other Moderators in the market.

  • If for any reason Exonym failed, the established network would be unaffected and carry on with business as usual.

    Transactions, rules, permissions, moderation, and services are completely independent of Exonym’s success or failure. Exonym’s sole role is to register new entities joining the network. Thus, the only implication would be that new entities could not register to join the network.

    In the event Exonym went bust, the registration system and database would be auctioned off. There would be immediate economic incentive to re-open registration, so the worst case scenario would likely amount to a short pause in new entities joining.

For developers

Rulebooks are open-source, and our test network is now live. The system provides developers with advanced anonymous authentications, web-scale single sign-on, clone prevention, and adaptive network governance.

For organizations

Rulebooks empower organizations to build private, inter-organizational, verifiable transactional networks. This framework enables standardized interoperability, agile governance, and vast civic and economic innovations across industries. Pre-registration is now open.

For everyday web users

Rulebooks realign economic incentives to move towards a future where Internet governance is not monopolized by a few corporations but is co-created by its most important stakeholders: the users. Support us to invert the web and ensure an open, democratic future online.

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