Divya Sornaraja has posted Transparency without Capacity on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
A transparency mandate is usually judged by what it promises the citizen; it is worth judging instead by what the state can deliver. Working from the enforcement record of the best-resourced regulators in the world, this paper argues that the frontier model of platform accountability—the European Union’s Digital Services Act, and its Article 40 researcher-access regime above all—presupposes functioning institutional machinery that most emerging-market states do not hold. Where the machinery is missing, a transparency right becomes a “paper-right”: present in the statute, void on the ground. The paper proposes one organising metric, “protection-per-capacity”—the protection a rule actually delivers, set against the institutional apparatus it needs before it delivers anything—and codes a set of regimes by that apparatus. Protection and apparatus move together. Central, ex-post enforcement then fails an emerging market in three ways: it is too costly to prosecute, too weak to deter, and unable to aggregate harm that is trivial for each person and vast in sum. The design that follows spends as little scarce capacity as possible: a one-click, self-service record of the citizen’s own consumption, placed in her hands as evidence; an aggregation-and-restitution engine built inside existing consumer law; and decentralised, judicially-reviewable auditing whose tools are an open commons rather than centrally procured. Decentralisation earns its place twice—it economises scarce capacity, and it removes the single lever by which a large-penalty apparatus can be turned against dissent.
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