Interjurisdictional competition — competition as external governance
The idea
Alston et al.'s external-force half: governance providers are themselves governed by the market they compete in. "Software platforms compete for users and, as a result, indirectly govern one another" (715); rival networks differentiate on quality AND on governance features themselves — consensus mechanisms as "competing sets of governance choices" (717–720). The market beats the electoral channel because each user consumes the product of their own choice rather than the majority's (715–716). The claimed payoff is a market for governance: institutional competition for voluntary support "may yield more efficient institutions" (720). But the claim is CONDITIONAL: it needs informed governed parties and supportive surrounding institutions; under rational political ignorance, most users don't monitor rules, leaving a small class of governance specialists (core devs, miners) disciplined mainly by the aggregate exit threat (720). Murtazashvili et al. echo the mechanism — altcoin entry and user exit discipline Bitcoin (116) — and Allen et al. supply its dynamic version: permissionless entry into governance provision as entrepreneurial discovery (663–664).
The Nostr engagement
Relay competition is this concept at high frequency and low stakes: relay operators and client devs are Nostr's governance specialists, users are rationally ignorant of relay policy, and the discipline is exit — but with near-zero switching costs and, crucially, a REGENERATING set of jurisdictions: exit routinely founds new relays rather than only reallocating share among incumbents ({{ref:concept-exit-voice|Exit, voice, and forking}}, {{ref:claim-relay-spectrum|The relay spectrum}}). Strains: (a) the informed-user condition is even less satisfied on Nostr, yet every policy change and defection is a logged typed event, so whether competition actually improves governance becomes empirically testable rather than assumed ({{ref:claim-formation-observable|Formation is observable for the first time}}, {{ref:q-does-competition-improve-governance|Q: Does interjurisdictional competition yield better governance?}}); (b) with no token revenue, what operators compete FOR (attention, reputation, subscription fees, ideology) is itself an open variable; (c) multihoming — users on many relays at once — blurs the "jurisdiction" unit that the interjurisdictional frame presumes ({{ref:claim-multiplicity-stack|Multiplicity}}).
Sources
- Alston, Law, Murtazashvili & Weiss 2022, pp. 715–720 ({{ref:src-polycentric-blockchain-orders|Alston, Law, Murtazashvili & Weiss 2022}}). - Murtazashvili et al. 2022, p. 116 ({{ref:src-blockchain-knowledge-commons|Murtazashvili, Murtazashvili, Weiss & Madison 2022}}). - Allen et al. 2023, pp. 663–665 ({{ref:src-exchange-theory-web3|Allen, Berg, Lane, MacDonald & Potts 2023}}).
Related: - {{ref:emergentgov|Index}} - {{ref:concept-exit-voice|Exit, voice, and forking}} - {{ref:concept-tier2-triangle|The tier-2 triangle}} - {{ref:concept-polycentricity|Polycentricity}} - {{ref:concept-requisite-variety|Requisite variety (Ashby's law, institutionalized)}} - {{ref:concept-survivorship-bias|Survivorship bias in commons theory}} - {{ref:claim-expand-contract|Expand–contract}} - {{ref:claim-worst-case-hosts-best-case|The worst case hosts the best case}} - {{ref:q-maturation-hypothesis|Q: The maturation hypothesis (flagged conjecture)}} - {{ref:q-generativity-robustness|Q: Is robustness generativity rather than redundancy?}}