01 — The standard: five clauses, and the proposal for legislation
The site's anchor page, and the reason everything lives here rather than on a service brand: this is the recommended subscription model, published as a standard a company can adopt this week, with the law-shaped version as a later artefact for consumer groups and committees.
1. The principle
A subscription is a discount for committing to regular use. It is not rent on something you have the right to ignore.
"That sentence does the work of the whole document, and it is the one to put at the top of the site." It is the tagline of every page — and per the naming discussion, it stays a tagline rather than a name (the abbreviation trap is real: Discount-Not-Rent → DNR).
2. The five clauses
Each one a company either meets or does not, each observable from outside — which is "the property that makes this a standard rather than a pledge."
| # | Clause | Observable how |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | We can tell you how much you used it | Ask, and see |
| 2 | We tell you without you having to ask | Do usage summaries arrive? |
| 3 | Leaving is as easy as joining, by the same route | Testable in a browser, without their cooperation |
| 4 | If you stop using it, we tell you before we charge you again | Observable over one renewal cycle |
| 5 | We do not charge for a period you could not have used | Outages, suspensions, lockouts |
The corpus discipline behind the design: "a dated test somebody else can repeat is evidence, and an assertion is marketing. A code of conduct whose clauses cannot be checked is the second thing."
3. The standard-before-law sequencing
"Draft it as a standard rather than as legislation, because a standard can be adopted by one company next week and a law cannot be adopted by anybody."
So the page ships in three layers:
- The standard — the five clauses, adoptable unilaterally, with a public adopters list (empty at launch, honestly).
- The conformance route — how a company declares adoption: a published policy page, which the register accepts as an answer (the reflexivity fix: answering becomes a one-time cost).
- The draft law — the same five clauses re-expressed as obligations, written later, explicitly labelled as a proposal, with the spring-2027 regime mapped beside it showing what it covers and what the five clauses add.
Layer 3 is where the site's ambition lives, and it has an unusually strong position: by the time the 2027 regime lands, the site will hold a year of register data showing which clauses companies already meet voluntarily — evidence for the legislative proposal generated by the register itself.
4. The maturity model — four axes, one needing no cooperation
| Axis | The question | Observed how |
|---|---|---|
| Knows | Can they tell you what you used? | Ask |
| Tells | Do they tell you before charging you again? | Watch one renewal cycle |
| Speed | Days from asking to a substantive answer | Measured |
| Exit | Is leaving as easy as joining, by the same route? | A browser, no contact required |
Exit is built first — click counts and routes for fifty companies, dated, method published so anyone can re-run it. "It is measured rather than reported, so no company can decline to participate in it." It follows the reproducible-test discipline of the 16 August comparison-pages brief, and it is the register's credibility deposit: a complete artefact before a single letter is sent.
5. What the standard is not
Not a scoreboard (no scores exist anywhere in the design) · not a pledge (every clause is externally checkable) · not the 2027 regime restated (three of the five clauses go beyond it — that delta is the legislative argument) · and not dependent on anyone's cooperation to start (clause 3 and the exit axis are measurable today, unilaterally).
This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).
== briefs/v0.33.62__subscriptions-brief-pack__02__the-register.md