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Convergence: Move from compliance within each institution to consequential completion across the system.
The six scenarios do not reveal one missing technology, one ideal intermediary or one law that should govern every case.
They reveal a recurrent policy failure.
A record is valid in one system but loses its limits in the next. An institution acts within its mandate while the resulting consequence extends beyond it. A person can correct source data but not the decision that relied upon it. A complaint resolves one case without reaching the rule, model, contract or interface that will reproduce the same failure.
Most digital policy is organised around entities, sectors and transactions. This remains necessary. The difficulty begins when several compliant components form a consequential path that no institution is required to govern end to end.
Policy must therefore address the handoff as well as the actor.
The recommendations below translate that proposition into seven implementable moves. They use instruments governments and public funders already possess: impact assessment, procurement, licensing, representation, redress, interoperability agreements, development finance and evaluation. Some can begin under existing mandates. Others require targeted statutory or sectoral recognition. None requires a new authority with jurisdiction over the whole system.
They are particularly relevant to middle powers. These states may be unable to impose a technical or regulatory model unilaterally, but they can coordinate procurement conditions, recognise compatible institutional safeguards, pool evaluation capacity and make access to public infrastructure conditional upon a shared governance floor. Their alignment need not begin with identical political values. It can begin with a reciprocal interest in preventing dependence, extraction and unremedied cross-border harm.
The policy objective is not to make one institution responsible for everything. It is to ensure that responsibility does not disappear between institutions.
Trust infrastructure should be governed through the complete consequential path: