A three-part series on licensing and the economics of digital sovereignty was planned: how the commons got built, how Europe is choosing to defend it, how the AI stack could be governed as one. Then Martin Owens, an Inkscape developer and member of its project leadership committee, replied to part one on Mastodon, in two posts stitched together by the character limit, and pointed straight at something the series had missed entirely.

A vocabulary has been metastasising through environmental policy. It did not arrive as a position to be argued with. It crept in quietly, one term at a time, through grant applications, government white papers, and conference panels, until it had colonised the language before most people noticed there was anything to resist. We are told that the central challenge of our warming, degrading world is to make nature investable. We hear about biodiversity credits, green bonds, and nature-based financial instruments. The premise is simple: public funds are scarce, the cost of ecological restoration is vast, and therefore we must design financial structures that allow private institutional capital to flow into conservation.

There are two dominant ways to think about who should govern artificial intelligence.

The market frame says: the data, the models, and the compute are private goods, owned by the organisations that assembled them, exchanged through contract and property rights. Governance follows ownership. OpenAI owns GPT-4. Google owns Gemini. These are products. Markets will sort it out.

The state frame says: AI is too consequential to leave to markets, so regulators must impose rules from above. The EU’s AI Act is the most developed version of this: binding requirements, conformity assessments, registration databases, penalties for violations.