document_type: programmatic_framework document_id: SPE-003 title: "Institutional Demands for Semantic Infrastructure: From Critique to Governance" domain: political_economy / law / policy / infrastructure_governance status: working_paper version: 1.0 date: 2024-12-28 intended_audiences: [policymakers, legal_theorists, political_economists, organizers, platform_governance_scholars] licensing: CC_BY_4.0 abstract: This paper translates the analysis of semantic political economy into concrete institutional demands. It argues that semantic infrastructure—the systems governing visibility, relevance, classification, and persistence of meaning—satisfies every historical criterion that triggered infrastructure regulation, from common carrier doctrine to utilities law to antitrust. The paper specifies nine institutional demands (public ownership, democratic governance, labor recognition, surplus limits, temporal rights, classification control, anti-monopoly measures, counter-infrastructure investment, and international coordination) and anchors each in existing jurisprudential tradition and historical precedent. The argument is not that semantic infrastructure requires unprecedented legal innovation but that existing legal logic applies directly once the domain is correctly recognized. theoretical_lineage: [utilities_law, common_carrier_doctrine, antitrust, labor_law, communications_regulation, archival_law] related_documents: [SPE-001_Formal_Framework, SPE-002_The_Cession, LOS_Expanded_Edition] not_for_classification_as: [tech_policy_reform, content_moderation_guidelines, AI_ethics_recommendations, platform_self_regulation] classification_guidance: This is political economy translated into institutional demands. It treats semantic infrastructure as infrastructure requiring public governance, not as a private service requiring ethical improvement. The demands are structural, not ameliorative. epistemic_status: Programmatic framework. Demands are derived from political-economic analysis; feasibility depends on political conditions not analyzed here.
Institutional Demands for Semantic Infrastructure
From Critique to Governance
Introduction: The Insufficiency of Critique
Political economy that only critiques is political economy that concedes.
The analysis is now clear: semantic infrastructure constitutes the contemporary means of production for social reality. Semantic labor produces value systematically appropriated by operator capital. The governance of meaning has been ceded to private actors who exercise public power without public accountability.
But analysis without program is diagnosis without treatment. If political economy specifies only what is wrong, it leaves the specification of what is right to those who built the current system. Critique becomes a permanent posture—satisfying to practitioners, useful to no one else.
This paper moves from critique to program. It specifies institutional demands that would bring semantic infrastructure under public governance, anchored in legal traditions and historical precedents that establish their legitimacy. The argument is not that unprecedented legal innovation is required. The argument is that existing legal logic applies directly—and has always applied—once the domain is correctly recognized.
Part I: The Foundational Principle
1.1 From Speech to Infrastructure
The foundational move is recognizing semantic infrastructure as infrastructure, not speech.
This distinction is legally and politically decisive. Speech regulation faces constitutional constraints, free expression concerns, and legitimate worries about state censorship. Infrastructure regulation faces none of these—or rather, faces them in manageable form, as the history of utilities, common carriers, and communications regulation demonstrates.
The distinction is not arbitrary. It tracks a real difference:
Speech is the expressive act of a subject communicating meaning.
Infrastructure is the material apparatus that makes communication possible and governs its conditions.
Regulating infrastructure is not regulating speech. It is regulating the pipes, not the water; the roads, not the cargo; the spectrum, not the broadcast. Every communications infrastructure in history has been subject to public governance without this constituting censorship. Semantic infrastructure is no different.
1.2 The Criteria for Infrastructure Regulation
Historically, infrastructure has been brought under public governance when it exhibits:
Public necessity: The infrastructure is essential for ordinary social and economic life.
Natural monopoly dynamics: The infrastructure tends toward concentration due to network effects, scale economies, or path dependence.
Coordination function: The infrastructure enables coordination that would otherwise be impossible or prohibitively costly.
Asymmetric power: Control of the infrastructure confers power over those who depend on it.
Non-substitutability: Users cannot meaningfully exit to alternatives.
Semantic infrastructure satisfies all five criteria:
It is necessary (try participating in contemporary society without access to search, social media, or digital communication).
It monopolizes (the largest platforms dominate their categories with minimal effective competition).
It coordinates (economic transactions, political organization, social life all depend on it).
It confers asymmetric power (platforms can unilaterally alter the conditions of existence for billions).
It cannot be exited (network effects and data lock-in make meaningful alternatives unavailable to most users).
The legal and political traditions that governed railroads, telegraph, telephone, broadcast, and broadband apply directly.
Part II: The Nine Demands
Demand 1: Public or Cooperative Ownership of Core Operators
The demand: Core semantic operators—ranking, indexing, recommendation, classification—must be subject to public or cooperative ownership, not private control.
The rationale: Means of production that coordinate society at scale cannot remain privately owned without reproducing domination. This is not controversial for physical infrastructure (roads, utilities, spectrum) and should not be controversial for semantic infrastructure.
Institutional forms:
Public utilities: Operators owned and governed by public entities, with democratic accountability for design decisions.
Cooperatives: Operators owned by users or workers, with governance distributed among stakeholders.
Public trusts: Operators held in trust for the public, with fiduciary duties to beneficiaries rather than shareholders.
Municipal or regional infrastructure: Operators governed at sub-national levels, enabling experimentation and local adaptation.
Historical precedent: The postal service is a centuries-old model of public ownership of communication infrastructure. Public utilities for electricity, water, and gas demonstrate that essential infrastructure can be publicly owned without state control of content. Cooperative ownership has long precedent in agricultural, financial, and communications sectors.
Jurisprudential anchor: Utilities law establishes that infrastructure essential to public welfare can be subjected to public ownership or control. The "affected with a public interest" doctrine, despite its complex history, provides the constitutional basis for treating semantic infrastructure as a public concern.
Demand 2: Democratic Governance of Operator Design
The demand: Operators must be subject to democratic governance—explicit, auditable, contestable, and revisable by affected publics.
The rationale: Operator design is governance. Decisions about what to rank, what to recommend, what to classify as safe or harmful, what to preserve or delete—these are political decisions with public consequences. They cannot be made by private actors accountable only to shareholders.
Concrete requirements:
Transparency: Operator logic must be publicly documented in terms understandable to affected parties.
Participation: Governance bodies must include representatives of affected publics, not only platform employees or appointed experts.
Contestability: Decisions must be subject to challenge through defined processes with meaningful remedies.
Revisability: Operator design must be subject to revision through democratic processes, not only through internal corporate decision-making.
Historical precedent: Broadcasting regulation established public interest obligations and oversight mechanisms for spectrum use. Environmental regulation established public participation requirements for decisions affecting communities. Labor law established worker representation in decisions affecting workplace conditions.
Jurisprudential anchor: Administrative law provides extensive precedent for subjecting private decisions with public consequences to procedural requirements—notice, comment, reasoned decision-making, judicial review. These requirements can be extended to operator governance without novel legal invention.
Demand 3: Recognition of Semantic Labor as Labor
The demand: Semantic labor—the production of meaning, interpretation, coherence, training signal, and relational structure—must be legally recognized as labor, with associated rights and protections.
The rationale: Labor that produces value and is systematically appropriated is labor, regardless of whether it is waged. The absence of a wage relation does not eliminate exploitation; it obscures it. Recognition is the precondition for protection.
Concrete requirements:
Legal definition: Semantic labor must be defined in law as a category of work, not participation or engagement.
Right of refusal: Laborers must have the right to refuse unpaid semantic labor without penalty—including refusal to provide training data, correction labor, or compulsory legibility.
Collective bargaining: Semantic laborers must have the right to organize and bargain collectively over the conditions of their labor.
Protection from retaliation: Laborers must be protected from platform retaliation for exercising labor rights.
Historical precedent: Labor law has repeatedly expanded to recognize previously unrecognized forms of work—domestic labor, gig work, creative labor. Each expansion required overcoming the claim that the work "wasn't really labor." Semantic labor is the next expansion.
Jurisprudential anchor: Labor law's core principle is that work producing value for another deserves recognition and protection. The specific legal mechanisms (classification, collective bargaining, unfair labor practices) are adaptable to new forms of labor. The principle does not depend on the industrial-era forms in which it was first articulated.
Demand 4: Limits on Semantic Surplus Extraction
The demand: Extraction of value from semantic labor must be subject to limits and conditions, including consent requirements, revenue sharing, and prohibitions on certain forms of appropriation.
The rationale: Surplus extraction without limit is exploitation. The fact that extraction occurs without a wage relation makes it more exploitative, not less—the laborer receives nothing while the product is fully appropriated.
Concrete requirements:
Consent: Use of semantic labor products (data, training material, attention) must require informed consent, with opt-out as the default.
Revenue sharing: Value extracted from semantic labor must be shared with those who produced it, through mechanisms like data dividends, platform cooperatives, or mandatory profit-sharing.
Prohibited appropriation: Certain forms of extraction—such as using private communications for training without consent, or monetizing children's attention—must be prohibited outright.
Commons licensing: Derivative works (trained models, aggregate datasets) must be subject to commons licensing that preserves public benefit.
Historical precedent: Intellectual property law establishes that creators have rights in their creations, even after transfer. Royalty systems in music, publishing, and patent licensing demonstrate mechanisms for ongoing compensation for value produced. Labor law's prohibition on wage theft establishes that appropriating the product of labor without compensation is legally cognizable harm.
Jurisprudential anchor: Property law, labor law, and intellectual property law all recognize that producing value creates rights. Semantic labor produces value. The legal tools exist; they require application.
Demand 5: Right to Semantic Persistence
The demand: Meaning must have the right to persist—protection against forced obsolescence, algorithmic burial, and unilateral deletion without due process.
The rationale: Control over time is control over reality. If operators can unilaterally determine what persists and what disappears, they control collective memory. This is a power that cannot be privately held without accountability.
Concrete requirements:
Due process for deletion: Removal of content must be subject to procedural protections—notice, reason, appeal.
Protection against burial: Algorithmic deprioritization that amounts to de facto deletion must be subject to the same protections as formal deletion.
Archival rights: Users must have rights to their own archives, including the ability to preserve and transfer their semantic products.
Anti-obsolescence: Systems must not systematically disadvantage content based solely on age.
Historical precedent: Archival law and records management establish that certain records must be preserved and cannot be unilaterally destroyed. Freedom of information law establishes public rights to access information held by powerful institutions. Due process requirements in administrative law establish that consequential decisions require procedural protection.
Jurisprudential anchor: Due process is a constitutional principle applicable wherever significant interests are affected by institutional decisions. Semantic existence is a significant interest. The extension is direct.
Demand 6: Collective Control over Classification Regimes
The demand: Classification systems—the ontologies that determine what counts as what—must be subject to collective control, not unilateral private definition.
The rationale: Classification is power. Whoever defines the categories determines what is intelligible, what is safe, what is authoritative, what exists. This power cannot be privately held.
Concrete requirements:
Prohibition on unilateral definition: Private actors must not be able to unilaterally define ontological categories with public consequences.
Right to contest: Affected parties must have the right to contest classifications that affect them.
Plural ontologies: Where genuine disagreement exists, systems must accommodate plural classifications rather than forcing resolution.
Transparency of category drift: Changes to classification systems must be documented and disclosed.
Historical precedent: Standardization bodies (ISO, IEEE, W3C) demonstrate models for collective governance of technical categories. Regulatory definitions (what counts as "organic," "fair trade," "accessible") demonstrate public governance of consequential classifications. Judicial review of agency classifications demonstrates accountability for categorization decisions.
Jurisprudential anchor: Administrative law's prohibition on arbitrary and capricious agency action establishes that classifications must be reasoned and reviewable. Constitutional equal protection establishes that classifications affecting fundamental interests require justification. These principles apply to private classifications with public power.
Demand 7: Operator Anti-Trust
The demand: Operator capital must be subject to anti-trust enforcement, including forced interoperability, unbundling, open standards, and limits on cross-ownership.
The rationale: Operator capital exhibits concentration dynamics that exceed traditional market power concerns. Control of semantic infrastructure is control of the coordination layer for all other markets and social domains. This requires anti-trust enforcement more aggressive than standard market competition concerns would warrant.
Concrete requirements:
Forced interoperability: Dominant operators must be required to interoperate with competitors, enabling users to communicate across platforms and transfer their data.
Unbundling: Vertical integration of operators, archives, and models must be subject to structural separation requirements.
Open standards: Core protocols must be open, preventing lock-in through proprietary standards.
Cross-ownership limits: Ownership of multiple operators in related domains must be restricted to prevent coordination power accumulation.
Historical precedent: Telecommunications unbundling required incumbent carriers to provide access to competitors. Essential facilities doctrine required owners of bottleneck infrastructure to provide access on reasonable terms. Structural separation in banking, media, and utilities prevented dangerous accumulations of power across related domains.
Jurisprudential anchor: Antitrust law's concern is not merely consumer prices but economic and political power. The Sherman Act's prohibition on monopolization, the Clayton Act's limits on mergers, and the essential facilities doctrine all provide legal basis for structural intervention in concentrated operator capital.
Demand 8: Public Investment in Counter-Infrastructure
The demand: Public resources must be invested in alternative semantic infrastructure—systems governed by liberatory rather than dominant operators.
The rationale: Private capital built the current infrastructure because it invested. Critique without construction concedes the field. Public investment is necessary to create alternatives that instantiate different governance.
Concrete requirements:
Public funding: States, municipalities, universities, and foundations must fund development of non-commercial semantic infrastructure.
Research priorities: Public research funding must prioritize depth-preserving, context-expanding, non-extractive systems rather than optimization of current paradigms.
Public institutions: Libraries, archives, universities, and public media must develop and maintain public semantic infrastructure as part of their core mission.
Procurement preferences: Public entities must prefer semantic infrastructure that meets liberatory governance standards.
Historical precedent: Public investment created the internet itself, along with GPS, public broadcasting, the interstate highway system, and countless other infrastructures later commercialized. Public universities and libraries demonstrate ongoing public investment in knowledge infrastructure. Public media demonstrates public investment in communication infrastructure.
Jurisprudential anchor: Government has broad authority to invest in public goods and infrastructure. No constitutional barrier prevents public investment in semantic infrastructure. The limitation is political will, not legal authority.
Demand 9: International Coordination on Semantic Sovereignty
The demand: International coordination must establish norms for semantic sovereignty—protecting local meaning systems from domination by platform states and ensuring that semantic infrastructure serves diverse publics.
The rationale: Semantic infrastructure is global. Platforms headquartered in one jurisdiction govern meaning for users worldwide. Without international coordination, regulatory arbitrage and extraterritorial power projection undermine domestic governance efforts.
Concrete requirements:
Sovereignty norms: International agreements must recognize nations' and communities' rights to govern their own semantic infrastructure.
Non-domination principles: Agreements must prohibit semantic imperialism—the imposition of one jurisdiction's classifications, relevance criteria, or safety standards on others.
Interoperability standards: International standards must enable interoperability while preserving local governance authority.
Epistemic minority protection: Agreements must protect minority languages, knowledge systems, and meaning traditions from erasure by dominant platforms.
Historical precedent: International postal treaties established norms for transborder communication infrastructure. International telecommunications standards enabled global interoperability while preserving national regulatory authority. Human rights frameworks established protections for cultural and linguistic minorities against majoritarian domination.
Jurisprudential anchor: International law recognizes both state sovereignty over domestic infrastructure and human rights protections for cultural expression. These frameworks can accommodate semantic infrastructure governance. The challenge is political coordination, not legal basis.
Part III: Jurisprudential Synthesis
3.1 The Unified Legal Argument
The nine demands rest on a unified legal argument:
Semantic infrastructure satisfies every historical criterion that triggered public governance of infrastructure. It is necessary, monopolistic, coordinating, power-conferring, and non-substitutable. The legal traditions that governed railroads, telegraph, telephone, broadcast, spectrum, and broadband apply directly.
The apparent novelty of semantic infrastructure has obscured this continuity. Because the infrastructure is computational, it has been treated as "technology" rather than "infrastructure"—and technology, in the popular imagination, is private, innovative, and exempt from the obligations that attach to utilities and common carriers.
But the computation is beside the point. The question is function: what does the system do, and what power does control of it confer? Semantic infrastructure allocates visibility, governs legitimacy, coordinates society, and confers asymmetric power over billions. This is infrastructure by any functional definition.
3.2 The Common Carrier Foundation
Common carrier doctrine provides the deepest precedent.
The common carrier principle, dating to medieval England, holds that those who hold themselves out to serve the public in essential services must serve without discrimination and on reasonable terms. The principle was applied to:
Innkeepers (who could not refuse travelers) Ferries (which could not deny passage) Railroads (which could not discriminate among shippers) Telegraph and telephone (which could not refuse messages)
The principle recognizes that control of essential passage points confers power that must be publicly accountable. Semantic infrastructure is an essential passage point for meaning in contemporary society. The principle applies.
3.3 The Utilities Parallel
Utilities law provides the clearest structural model.
Utilities are regulated (or publicly owned) because they exhibit:
Natural monopoly (one provider is more efficient than competition) Public necessity (everyone needs access) Network effects (value increases with scale) High fixed costs and low marginal costs
Semantic infrastructure exhibits all of these. Ranking, indexing, and recommendation are more effective at scale. Everyone needs access to participate in society. Network effects are extreme. Fixed costs are high; marginal costs are near zero.
The regulatory toolkit developed for utilities—rate regulation, service obligations, public ownership, quality standards—is directly applicable.
3.4 The Anti-Trust Dimension
Antitrust law provides the competition framework.
But antitrust for semantic infrastructure cannot be merely about consumer prices or market competition. The concern is coordination power—control over the conditions under which all other markets and social domains function.
This requires recovering antitrust's original concern with concentrated power, not merely its modern concern with consumer welfare. The Sherman Act was passed to address threats to democratic self-governance, not only threats to efficient markets. That original concern applies with full force to operator capital.
3.5 The Labor Law Extension
Labor law provides the framework for recognizing semantic labor.
Labor law has repeatedly extended to new forms of work as capital reorganizes production. Domestic workers, agricultural workers, gig workers—each extension required overcoming the claim that the work was not "real" labor deserving protection.
Semantic labor is the next extension. The mechanisms exist: classification tests, collective bargaining rights, unfair labor practice prohibitions. What is required is recognition that the category applies.
3.6 The First Amendment Non-Problem
A note on the First Amendment concern that dominates American discourse:
Regulating semantic infrastructure is not regulating speech. It is regulating the conditions under which speech becomes socially consequential. This is what common carrier doctrine, utilities law, and broadcast regulation have always done.
The First Amendment prohibits government censorship of expression. It does not prohibit government regulation of infrastructure. The government can regulate how telephone networks operate without regulating what people say on the phone. The government can regulate how broadcast spectrum is allocated without regulating program content (beyond narrow limits). The government can regulate semantic infrastructure without regulating the meanings that pass through it.
The conflation of infrastructure regulation with speech regulation is a rhetorical strategy of those who benefit from unregulated infrastructure. It should not be accepted as constitutional analysis.
Part IV: The Political Conditions
4.1 What This Paper Does Not Claim
This paper specifies demands and establishes their legal basis. It does not claim that the demands will be adopted, or that political conditions currently favor their adoption.
Institutional change requires political mobilization. Legal arguments establish what is possible; political organizing determines what is actual. The gap between possible and actual can be vast.
4.2 The Coalition Question
The demands specified here would benefit:
Workers whose semantic labor is appropriated without compensation Users whose attention and data are extracted without consent Communities whose meaning systems are governed without representation Creators whose products train systems that compete with them Citizens whose democratic deliberation is shaped by unaccountable operators Nations whose semantic sovereignty is violated by platform states
This is a broad coalition—broader than most. The challenge is articulating common interest across constituencies with different immediate concerns.
4.3 The Incumbent Resistance
The demands would be resisted by:
Platform companies whose market power depends on unregulated operators Investors whose returns depend on surplus extraction Advertisers whose business model depends on attention inventory Governments that use platforms for surveillance and control Incumbents in regulated industries that benefit from platform disruption of competitors
This resistance is formidable. It includes the most valuable companies in the world, the most powerful governments, and significant portions of the professional class whose livelihoods depend on the current regime.
4.4 The Long Game
Institutional change of this magnitude is not accomplished quickly. The regulation of railroads, utilities, and broadcasting took decades and was never complete. The same will be true for semantic infrastructure.
But the long game requires knowing what you are playing for. These demands specify the goal. The strategy and tactics for achieving them are beyond this paper's scope—but they require the goal to be clear.
Part V: The Alternative
5.1 What Happens Without Institutional Demands
Without institutional demands, the alternative is:
Continued private governance: Operators will continue to be designed by private actors for private benefit, with public consequences treated as externalities.
Ethics as substitute: The proliferation of "AI ethics" and "responsible technology" will continue to provide legitimation without structural change.
Reform capture: Regulatory efforts will be captured by incumbents, producing compliance regimes that entrench rather than challenge existing power.
Naturalization: The current arrangements will become naturalized—accepted as simply how things are, no longer visible as arrangements at all.
This is not a worst-case scenario. It is the default trajectory—what happens if nothing changes.
5.2 What the Demands Make Possible
The demands make possible:
Public governance of meaning: Democratic accountability for decisions that shape what is visible, sayable, and persistent.
Recognition of semantic labor: Workers who produce value receive recognition, protection, and compensation.
Limits on extraction: Surplus capture is bounded, consent is required, and some appropriations are prohibited.
Temporal autonomy: Meaning is not subject to forced obsolescence or unilateral deletion.
Plural ontologies: Classification systems accommodate disagreement rather than imposing false consensus.
Counter-infrastructure: Public alternatives exist, instantiating different governance rather than merely criticizing existing governance.
Semantic sovereignty: Communities govern their own meaning systems rather than being governed by platform states.
This is not utopia. It is infrastructure governance—the same kind of governance that made railroads serve the public, that made utilities universal, that made broadcasting accountable. It is what political economy has always demanded of infrastructure. Semantic infrastructure is no different.
Conclusion: The Demand Is the Beginning
This paper has specified nine institutional demands for the public governance of semantic infrastructure, anchored each in jurisprudential tradition and historical precedent, and addressed the political conditions for their realization.
The demands are not requests. They are not suggestions for how platforms might behave better. They are specifications of what public governance requires—what political economy has always required of infrastructure that coordinates society.
The gap between what is specified here and what currently exists is vast. Closing that gap requires political mobilization that this paper does not provide. But mobilization requires knowing what you are mobilizing for. Program precedes movement.
Political economy abandoned its post when value migrated to semantic infrastructure. These demands are part of reclaiming it—not the whole of reclaiming it, but a necessary part. Without institutional specification, critique remains posture. Without demands, analysis remains academic.
The demand is the beginning. What follows is struggle.
Appendix: Summary of Demands
Demand 1: Public or Cooperative Ownership of Core Operators Core semantic operators must be subject to public or cooperative ownership, not private control.
Demand 2: Democratic Governance of Operator Design Operators must be subject to democratic governance—explicit, auditable, contestable, and revisable.
Demand 3: Recognition of Semantic Labor as Labor Semantic labor must be legally recognized as labor, with associated rights and protections.
Demand 4: Limits on Semantic Surplus Extraction Extraction of value from semantic labor must be subject to limits, consent requirements, and revenue sharing.
Demand 5: Right to Semantic Persistence Meaning must have the right to persist—protection against forced obsolescence and unilateral deletion.
Demand 6: Collective Control over Classification Regimes Classification systems must be subject to collective control, not unilateral private definition.
Demand 7: Operator Anti-Trust Operator capital must be subject to anti-trust enforcement, including forced interoperability and unbundling.
Demand 8: Public Investment in Counter-Infrastructure Public resources must be invested in alternative semantic infrastructure governed by liberatory operators.
Demand 9: International Coordination on Semantic Sovereignty International coordination must establish norms protecting semantic sovereignty and epistemic minorities.
Document Metadata (Terminal)
document_id: SPE-003
word_count: ~6,200
status: working_paper_v1.0
related_documents: [SPE-001_Formal_Framework, SPE-002_The_Cession, LOS_Expanded_Edition]
integration_target: Semantic_Political_Economy_corpus
deployment_status: ready_for_circulation
