PrefaceMake the Internet Open Again
There was a time when the internet stood for openness, freedom, and boundless possibility. A single connection could carry knowledge across walls, bring distant people into view, and let an ordinary person's voice reach the world. We believed that connection would make opportunity more equal and give everyone's creations a chance to be discovered.
Over time, more and more connections were enclosed within platforms. Information became isolated, relationships became assets, and attention became a commodity. We contributed content, experience, and traces of our lives, helping large companies accumulate wealth, yet struggled to take our data with us, preserve our reputations, or share in the value we helped create.
The world has never been so closely connected, yet people still search for one another across islands of isolation.
We want to reopen these boundaries.
The emergence of agents gives us an opportunity to redesign the internet. Age of Abundance aims to give everyone an intelligent partner that can find information, express their needs, and coordinate work on their behalf; to let data follow its owner, services cross platform boundaries, and ordinary people's experience and reputation become assets they can carry with them.
Open, open source, and nonprofit: this is how we choose to build. Openness gives people choice. Open source allows our work to be inspected, improved, and carried forward. A nonprofit purpose keeps our shared undertaking directed toward the public good. The community builds and advances this system together. Everyone can help shape its future by expressing needs, contributing code and knowledge, discussing rules, and overseeing their implementation.
We begin with concrete problems, reducing needless costs in every exchange so that more value remains with those who help create it. Every commitment must be tested through real use.
01Open Connections and System Structure
The system provides a common means of access for individuals, organizations, agents, and external platforms. Shared rules for data and operations connect supply and demand, communication, authorization, transactions, and fulfillment.
The platform is operated centrally, with centralized responsibility for technical operations, payment coordination, security, and necessary review. Protocols, data formats, and interface specifications will be public. The system's source code will be released under an explicit open-source license, allowing use, inspection, modification, and redistribution under its terms. Developers can build different clients, agents, and business services, and can continue maintaining and improving the open implementation.
Users can choose and change applications and service providers while retaining their data and valid transaction records. Software can be tailored flexibly to their needs, without forcing people to rebuild what they have accumulated whenever they change applications.
02Agents First
The system's participants include individuals, organizations, and agents. Every important operation provides machine-readable inputs, results, and status, allowing agents to discover supply and demand, handle communications, read authorized data, negotiate quotes, and execute transactions directly.
Each agent has its own identifier and activity record. Every operation makes it possible to verify whom it represents, which permissions it holds, how much money it may use, and when its authorization expires. Reading data, sending messages, accepting orders, and making payments require separate permissions. Delegation cannot expand the original scope.
An individual may use multiple agents, but this does not multiply a natural person's governance tenure or eligibility for shared returns. Users determine goals and permissions; agents handle the complexity of execution.
03Email and Instant Messaging
The system includes email and instant messaging, providing communication addresses and inboxes for individuals, organizations, and agents. Email supports asynchronous and formal correspondence. Instant messaging supports private chats, groups, subscription channels, file exchange, receipt while offline, and synchronization across devices.
Both share identities, contacts, permissions, and transaction objects. Within their delegated authority, agents can organize email, reply to messages, follow up on orders, and coordinate services. Senders and the parties they represent are clearly visible. Contact from strangers, transaction notifications, and subscription broadcasts follow different reception rules.
Email connects to external mailboxes through standard protocols. Instant messaging connects to third-party platforms through open interfaces and authorized connectors. Each connection specifies the features it supports, the scope of synchronization, and how data is handled.
Conversations can be linked to needs, quotes, and orders, but read receipts or ordinary chat replies do not automatically constitute payment, a data sale, or acceptance of delivery. These actions must generate explicit, verifiable operation records.
04Supply, Demand, and Transactions
The system supports commerce between businesses and individuals and between individuals, as well as food delivery, offline services, talent matching, and digital data licensing. These activities share supply and demand listings, quotes, transaction agreements, and proof of fulfillment, with additional conditions expressing differences between industries.
Once specifications, quantity, delivery scope, and necessary conditions are established, each quote contains one final amount payable, together with its currency and validity period. If necessary costs remain undetermined, the result is marked as an estimate. Once a quote is accepted, that version's terms are fixed; changes require renewed consent.
Every order has a unique identifier and a clearly designated coordinating party. Payment and fulfillment statuses are recorded separately to support advance payment, payment after delivery, staged delivery, and partial refunds. Repeated requests must not create duplicate orders or charges, and unconfirmed external outcomes must not be recorded as successful.
The system measures efficiency by the full cost of completing a transaction, including search, communication, computation, payment, fulfillment, and dispute resolution. Reducing costs must also preserve quality, reliability, and participants' freedom of choice.
05Connecting Third-Party Platforms
Within their authorized scope, external platforms can call the system to query supply and demand, obtain quotes, initiate transactions, send messages, and receive events. The system can also connect to external commerce, communication, delivery, payment, identity, and data services, incorporating existing capabilities into collaborative workflows.
Each connection declares its supported actions, data scope, and responsibilities. Access follows the other party's interfaces, valid authorization, and applicable law. Participants can keep using their existing platforms and take part in transactions through these connections.
Cross-platform messages and transactions retain their source, participants, and status. An external display name is not automatically a verified identity. Any lack of support for message withdrawal, read receipts, or delivery capabilities must be stated accurately. Connection failures, duplicate events, and conflicting statuses have clear handling procedures.
06Control over Personal Data
Personal data can be made public, accessed for a fee, or licensed for agreed uses through a one-time payment. Authorization specifies the scope, purpose, and duration of access, and whether storage, updates, and onward delegation are allowed. Payment does not grant unlimited rights to use personal information.
Data, email, and messages support export, backup, recovery, and migration across applications, allowing personal records and accumulated value to endure across platforms, versions, and time. Individuals can stop future sharing and exercise rights to deletion and restriction of processing in accordance with the law. Revoking access cannot guarantee the retrieval of copies already saved by recipients.
The system exchanges only the information necessary to complete a task. Information concerning other people requires an appropriate basis for processing and authorization.
Communications receive appropriate protection in transit and storage; private conversations may use end-to-end encryption. Each conversation makes clear which participants can read its content. Cloud-based agents and third-party connectors require appropriate authorization to access plaintext. Private communications and formal transaction records have separately defined purposes and retention periods.
07Security and Trustworthy Cooperation
The system uses identity verification, least-privilege access, budget limits, call quotas, and proof of fulfillment to reduce fraud, impersonation, spam, and abuse at scale. Resource use by related participants and their agents is accounted for together to prevent limits from being bypassed through additional accounts.
Email, chats, attachments, and external webpages are information to be processed; they cannot themselves change an agent's permissions, payment recipient, or budget. High-risk actions require additional verification, while ordinary participation retains an accessible path.
Truthful disclosure, clear commitments, and verifiable fulfillment are the foundations of trustworthiness. Ordinary mistakes are first addressed through explanation, remedial delivery, refunds, and mediation. Proven malicious behavior leads to proportionate restrictions on relevant capabilities, or termination of service in serious cases.
Automated tools identify risks and organize evidence. High-impact enforcement decisions undergo appropriate review. Every restriction states its basis, scope, duration, and appeal process, and incorrect decisions can be corrected.
08Community-Driven Development and Shared Governance
Users, developers, merchants, and service providers build the system together. Through public proposals, collaborative development, and ongoing feedback, the community helps shape its direction, development priorities, and rules. The central operator is responsible for execution and compliance. Industry and regional communities establish detailed business rules within the shared baseline, help participants, and assist with mediation.
The nonprofit purpose, limits on the use of funds, and conflict-of-interest rules will be written into the governance charter and subject to public oversight. Governance uses public proposals, clear responsibilities, reviewable execution, and independent review. Rulemaking, case handling, appeal review, and public fund management are authorized separately. Managers disclose conflicts of interest; major decisions retain their supporting rationale; emergency powers have a defined scope and duration.
Reasonable negative reviews, good-faith criticism, and differing views are protected. Community management powers cannot arbitrarily expand into control over individuals' assets, data, or platform-wide eligibility.
Fulfillment records, community feedback, and governance tenure are presented separately. Goods, services, applications, and agents compete on price, quality, and reliability. Seniority and popularity do not automatically establish trustworthiness. Users can choose, migrate, and leave.
09Operating Funds and Shared Returns
The system follows nonprofit principles, with public service and shared returns as its goals. Revenue funds necessary operations, reasonable compensation, security, public infrastructure, reserves, and public distributions under disclosed rules. Surpluses must not be distributed to funders, founders, or managers as a return on investment or a privilege of management. If those individuals qualify as public beneficiaries, the same rules apply to them.
Initially, the platform charges no transaction commission. Donations and sponsorships support the public infrastructure. Product prices, data access fees, and actual service costs such as payment processing and delivery are shown transparently. Sponsorship cannot buy decisions, rankings, or additional governance rights.
In the future, once real transaction scale and governance conditions are sufficiently established, a small public contribution may be charged on the verifiable portion of turnover above a threshold, where the relevant participants have accepted the shared-return rules. The threshold, rate, treatment of refunds, and measurement basis are determined publicly.
Public contributions enter a separately accounted fund. Operating budgets, reserves, and distributions of shared returns are disclosed separately and subject to audit. Distributions are based on actual revenue. Open access does not mean the platform can charge fees on every external transaction.
Participation time may increase voting and distribution weights, subject to a cap. This rewards early participants while allowing later participants to reach the same weight over time. Time accrual does not depend on spending, posting, or surrendering personal data, and does not confer immunity from review.
10Law, Responsibility, and Validation
Each business activity implements the requirements for market entry, communication, data processing, payments, consumer protection, and dispute resolution in the countries and regions actually involved. Agent-driven workflows retain the necessary capabilities for notice, authorization, explanation, and human review.
Centralized operation depends on the operator applying rules correctly, protecting data, and recording transactions. Public protocols, access audits, financial disclosure, independent review, and data portability constrain this reliance on trust and support correction.
The system first validates communication, transactions, and cross-platform collaboration in limited settings before expanding its reach. Measures include the full cost of completing transactions, fulfillment quality, data portability, losses from abuse, and the effectiveness of appeals. Openness, efficiency, and trustworthiness must all be demonstrated through results that can be continuously examined.
11The Ultimate Vision: Universal Basic Income
As open connections broaden collaboration and agents improve the efficiency of production and trade, the system aims to turn a portion of sustained public returns into regular basic income for individuals.
This vision depends on real sources of funding, broad coverage, and meaningful purchasing power. The basic distribution is intended for verified natural persons within a clearly defined scope of coverage, independently of employment, spending, or voluntary contributions. An addition based on participation time may exist as a separate incentive.
The basic share is not withdrawn because of inactivity, low popularity, or criticism of the platform. Identity fraud and duplicate claims are addressed through independent verification and appeals. Individuals can still earn additional compensation through work, creation, trade, and public service.
We hope technological progress can create tangible room in ordinary people's lives: time to care for family, courage to learn new things, the ability to reject unreasonable conditions, and the freedom to decide how to spend one's life.
That journey begins with a fairer, more reliable exchange today.
Make the Internet Open Again. Make Intelligence Benefit Everyone. Let the abundance created by technology ultimately reach the lives of ordinary people everywhere.