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The ⿻ Plural Stack: Rebuilding our Digital Foundations from Protocol Up

By Andreas Fauler, Anja von Rosenstiel, Jacopo Nuti, Ferdinand Ferroli, Arno Laeven, Marina Markezic, Vyara Savova, Mateo Rodriguez, Jack Henderson · June 17, 2026

Contact: andreas@radicalxchange.org

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Short description of the proposal or policy framework

The ⿻ Plural Stack is a policy and design framework for building digital infrastructure that is plural by architecture rather than extractive by default. It argues that rules alone cannot deliver digital self-determination: regulation governing the conduct of dominant platforms leaves intact the architectural logic by which platform power accumulates. The framework proposes a third path, beyond US platform capitalism and Chinese state authoritarianism, that synthesises the best of each tradition: democratic and rights-based governance, dynamic market-driven innovation, and proactive public investment. It is grounded in ⿻ Plural protocol ecosystems, built on open protocols: formal specifications that permit many independent, interoperable implementations and thereby resist capture.

It articulates ⿻ Plurality across three coequal dimensions: technical, economic, and social. Three layers of properties are distinguished within those dimensions: foundational properties that are enforceable by design (privacy-by-design, non-extractive value distribution, participatory governance); the emergent properties they enable (verifiable trust, composability, agency); and the super-emergent properties that follow when all three dimensions hold at once: sovereignty, resilience, and competitiveness. Through this architecture, each structural problem is answered in kind: systemic vulnerability becomes resilience, economic extraction becomes competitiveness, and strategic dependency becomes shared sovereignty.

It provides a two-tiered structure for a ⿻ Plural protocol assessment framework, whose first gate asks whether a system is genuinely a protocol or a platform, and whose second tier scores foundational properties along a maturity spectrum. Finally, eight concrete policy recommendations are laid out. Its logic is transformation, not exclusion: it invites any actor who honors plural values, including those from the US or China.

At its core, a ⿻ Plural protocol ecosystem rests on four core tenets:

What problem did this project seek to address?

Core digital infrastructure is concentrated in a handful of providers, producing systemic vulnerability, extractive economics, and strategic dependency. The deeper issue is not the foreign origin of these platforms but the architectural logic of centralisation. A domestic “big tech” would behave the same way. The EU has responded with an ambitious regulatory programme including the Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, Data Act, and AI Act. These instruments discipline incumbents, but they regulate gatekeepers without constituting successors: they constrain how concentrated power behaves without changing the architecture that lets it concentrate in the first place.

The stakes are now openly acknowledged. The European Parliament’s January 2026 resolution on technological sovereignty (adopted 471–68) noted dependence on non-EU countries for over 80% of digital products, services, infrastructure, and intellectual property, a dependence that MEPs across the political spectrum described as amounting to a “digital colony.”

The ⿻ Plural Stack addresses this gap. Instead of only regulating, it asks what infrastructure should be built so that openness, privacy, and shared value are properties of the system itself. The aim is to move public investment and procurement from buying access to capturable platforms toward commissioning protocols that cannot be captured.

Was this developed in partnership with any organization or in response to a call for submissions, etc?

The framework builds on the intellectual lineage of ⿻ Plurality, the body of work associated with E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and the RadicalxChange and ⿻ Plurality communities. The Plural Stack Initiative draws on Taiwan’s digital-democracy practice (g0v, vTaiwan, the Presidential Hackathon), decentralisation-by-design, and recent policy initiatives such as “The European Way”, “Rebalancing Europe’s Digital Power” and the Eurostack. It is the collaborative work of an interdisciplinary group of researchers, legal experts, and practitioners from across the ⿻ Plurality community with contributors from the European Ethereum Institute, Identity Valley, the European Decentralisation Institute, and the Global Solutions Initiative. It is offered as a contribution to the policy debate on digital self-determination and as a companion to RxC’s existing data- and governance-focused proposals.

How does this support more democratic outcomes?

The framework relocates democratic values from policy promises into the architecture of the infrastructure itself.

Who are the key audiences or communities of participants?

The ⿻ Plural Stack contributes to a growing international conversation about public digital infrastructure. It complements RxC’s data-governance proposals (the Data Freedom Act, Data Escrows, Sectoral Data Bargaining) and Community Governance for Blockchain. The ⿻ Plural Stack Initiative continues to develop the ⿻ Plural Stack Assessment and aims to support digital sovereignty initiatives and protocol ecosystems in becoming fully plural, as well as supporting governments in implementing the policy recommendations and applying ⿻ Plurality more broadly. The initiative is open to additional collaborators.