Why Free Commerce
Commerce belongs to its participants.
Free Commerce is a simple idea. Any organisation should be able to trade with any other without first asking a third party’s permission, and without losing what it has built when it leaves.
What we mean by free
Free as in freedom, not as in price.
- Free to connect. No organisation needs a third party’s permission to trade with another.
- Free to compete. A better product wins because it is better, not because its maker owns the network.
- Free to choose. The smallest supplier takes part on the same technical terms as the largest enterprise.
- Free to leave. An organisation’s records, credentials and reputation go with it.
What we do not mean
- Not free of charge. Platforms should be paid for the value they deliver. We want success to depend on the value delivered, not the dependency imposed.
- Not free of rules. Commerce needs governance, accountability and law. Free Commerce asks that the rules be open and that no single organisation writes them alone.
- Not against platforms. We have no wish to eliminate commercial platforms or diminish commercial success. Let thousands of platforms flourish.
Why it matters now
Intelligent agents are beginning to find opportunities, weigh alternatives, negotiate terms and execute transactions on behalf of people and organisations.
This could release extraordinary productivity. It could also hand unprecedented power to whoever controls the systems those agents must pass through.
The terms on which machines trade are being settled now. We think they should be settled in the open.
How it becomes real
Through open standards: a common language that no participant can capture and anyone can help improve.
We begin with procurement, and with one standard, SIGNET.
Questions we are asked
- Is this a campaign against platforms?
- No. Competition belongs above the standard, not over control of it. A platform that wins on performance, service or imagination has nothing to fear from customers who are free to leave.
- Who pays for an open standard?
- Not the people who use it. SIGNET is in the public domain and costs nothing to read, implement or adopt. The Foundation intends to sustain itself through certification fees that are published and identical for every implementer. No certification has been issued yet.
- Why start with procurement?
- Because it is where organisations find, qualify and contract with one another, and where the cost of fragmentation is hardest to ignore.
- Why a foundation?
- Because a shared language stays neutral only if no implementer owns it. Concert Foundation stewards the standard and runs no implementation of it.
- What would success look like?
- We will judge our success not by how much commerce we control, but by how much we help set free.