Paper Detail
Philippe Page, Robert Mitwicki, Michal Pietrus
The 2023 paper \emph{Distributed Governance: a Principal-Agent Approach to Data Governance} arXiv:2308.07280 introduced the autonomous principal as the locus of transactional sovereignty in digital ecosystems. This follow-up, Part 2, advances a structural argument for why that model is not a normative preference but a consequence of taking causality seriously in distributed information systems. Drawing an analogy with the transition from Newtonian to relativistic physics, we show that custodial identity management rests on an implicit assumption of global simultaneity that fails as soon as identity must operate across ecosystems, jurisdictions, and the offline/online boundary. Once that assumption is dropped, state ceases to be a noun held by a central authority and becomes a relation maintained between principals through causally ordered exchanges. The autonomous principal emerges as the only entity with standing to define its own reference frame. We report on technology built since 2023 that operationalises this view, and outline its consequences for cross-border data flows and agentic systems.
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@article{page2026newtonian,
title = {From Newtonian to Relativistic IAM: The Autonomous Principal as Reference Frame for Digital Identity},
author = {Philippe Page and Robert Mitwicki and Michal Pietrus},
year = {2026},
abstract = {The 2023 paper \textbackslash{}emph\{Distributed Governance: a Principal-Agent Approach to Data Governance\} arXiv:2308.07280 introduced the autonomous principal as the locus of transactional sovereignty in digital ecosystems. This follow-up, Part 2, advances a structural argument for why that model is not a normative preference but a consequence of taking causality seriously in distributed information systems. Drawing an analogy with the transition from Newtonian to relativistic physics, we show that custodial },
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17002},
keywords = {cs.CY},
eprint = {2606.17002},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}