Preprints firstCC0 1.0Reviewed in deployment

Research

Frameworks for systems that already run

When software decides something about a person, can that person get it corrected?

The method is the same every time. Write down what a system has to do before anyone can correct it. Then test a real one against that, usually while the people who run it are defending it. That is when they say plainly what it does and what it will not let you check.

Ordered by how finished the work is: the papers first, then the drafts at the IETF, then the areas, then the systems that were reviewed.

Papers

The papers

Open access · CC0 1.0 · SSRN

2026 · Apr 29 Deterministic public infrastructure

Corrigibility as a Structural Precondition for Digital Public Infrastructure: A Cybernetic Framework

Five jointly necessary conditions are argued, via an analytical reading of Ashby's law of requisite variety, to close a corrective loop. The control model is an abstraction, not a claim that public infrastructures are literally LTI systems. Corrigibility does not guarantee fairness; it guarantees reversibility.

rev. 11 Jul 2026 · 54 pp. · doi 10.2139/ssrn.6059075

Read the paper → SSRN ↗

2026 · Rev. 11 Jul Learned and agentic infrastructure

Epistemic Capture and the Action Boundary: Corrigibility for Learned and Agentic Public Infrastructure

Corrigibility extended to systems that learn: opacity of inference, variety drift, and the boundary past which signing authority cannot be delegated to a model.

rev. 11 Jul 2026 · 37 pp. · doi 10.2139/ssrn.6669318

Read the paper → SSRN ↗

In protocol

The drafts at the IETF

A signature tells you which key signed. It does not tell you who was allowed to act, or who the decision was about. When software acts for someone those are separate facts, and they have to travel with the request. These drafts add them.

draft-aravind-oauth-operator-of-record IETF · OAuth · individual

The Operator of Record in OAuth

The party accountable for an agent's action, carried in the token rather than inferred from the key that signed it.

In plain terms

When software acts for you, someone has to be answerable for it. This makes that person or organisation part of the request itself, so it cannot be worked out after the fact — or denied.

Datatracker ↗

draft-aravind-oauth-decision-subject IETF · OAuth · individual

The Decision Subject in OAuth

The person a decision is about, named in the exchange — distinct from the party who requested it and the party who is authorised.

In plain terms

The person a system decides about is often not the person using it. If a decision is never recorded as being about you, there is nothing for you to appeal. This writes you into the record.

Datatracker ↗

draft-ranjbar-dane-did IETF · DANE · individual · co‑authored with Kaveh Ranjbar

Rooting Decentralized Identifiers in DNSSEC: A DANE-EE Key-Binding Profile

Decentralised identifiers bound to the DNS through DANE, so a DID resolves against a name whose control is already provable — rather than against a registry that has to be trusted separately.

In plain terms

An agent's identity should be checkable the same way a website's is, against the domain that vouches for it — not against a list somebody else keeps and can quietly edit.

Datatracker ↗

IETF contributions ↗ Agentic standards landscape ↗ The case in MediaNama ↗

Areas

What is still going, and what is finished

Active

Standardisation Base specification

OpenSLM

A standardisation organisation for small language models — it turns the inspectability requirement into something a vendor can be held to, so a claim about a model is checked against a published profile rather than a launch post.

Publishes: Versioned specifications · conformance levels
Disclosure: LWD-R — logic, weights, data, representation

Base specification ↗

Computational institutions Essays · paper in progress

When procedure becomes software

What changes when an institution’s judgement is replaced by a string comparison: an officer who once reconciled spellings on the ground becomes an OCR pass and an exact match, and the discrepancy is reported as the citizen’s.

Cases: Electoral rolls · school and welfare systems
Published: India’s Centralisation Migraine — The Wire, 2025

The Layer 8 →

Standing

Digital identity Review · court record

Identity as infrastructure

Enrolment, authentication, and the mandates that accumulate around an identity system after it ships. The mandates issued downstream are part of what the system does, whatever the enrolment design says.

Systems: Aadhaar · UPI · BHIM · Aarogya Setu · CoWIN
Notes: UPI security needs a bug tracker · Wrappers, Not Records
Campaign: rethinkaadhaar.in — non-partisan campaign on India’s Aadhaar project
Signed: Joint statement on equitable access to COVID vaccines · 2021

Action research →

Public digital infrastructure Observatory

India Stack Watch

An architectural critique of India’s public digital infrastructure, component by component: what each one claims, what it does once deployed, and where the two diverge. The record is kept as the stack changes, so drift is visible over time.

Surface: indiastack.in
Covers: Identity · payments · health · consent
Source: anivar/indiastack.in

Observatory ↗

Language technologies Published standard

Language at the device layer

Indian-language input treated as infrastructure rather than as a feature: what a device must support before a language is usable on it, and what a national standard can and cannot compel. The same question returns at the namespace layer, where the root zone decides whether a script can exist in a domain name at all.

Standard: BIS IS 16333 (Part 3)
Software: Indic Keyboard — with the Indic Project; maintained by Jishnu Mohan
Root zone: Neo-Brahmi Generation Panel · ICANN
Record: Talks · 2005 onward

Internet governance Root zone LGR

Rules at the root of the namespace

Rule-making at the layer beneath the applications. The Neo-Brahmi Generation Panel develops the Root Zone Label Generation Rules for Brahmi-derived scripts — which code point sequences are permissible in a top-level domain label, and which are held to be variants of each other. It decides whether a script can exist in the namespace at all.

Panel: Neo-Brahmi Generation Panel · ICANN, formed 2015
Bodies: ICANN · IETF · IGF · national consultations
Record: ICANN60 · ICANN57 fellowship · IGF 2008 Hyderabad · IGF 2017 online
Signed: OpenStand — the modern paradigm for standards, for the Indic Project

Panel record ↗

On record

Telecom regulation Filings · outcome on record

Net neutrality

The Indian campaign ran through the formal consultation process. Zero rating was the mechanism at issue: a subsidy that decides which parts of the internet exist for a first-time user, alongside a licence regime for internet voice that would have priced it like a phone call.

Role: Mozilla India · Policy and Advocacy Task Force
Filed: MyGov, DoT committee report · letter to the Minister · TRAI differential pricing
Outcome: Differential pricing barred, Feb 2016
Presented at: London · Singapore · Cologne · Berlin · Hamburg · Frankfurt

Speaking record →

Patents 2006 – 2015

Software patents and the knowledge commons

Section 3(k) of the Patents Act excludes computer programs per se from patentability. That exclusion has been reopened at intervals — 2006, 2009, 2012, and again in 2015, when the examination guidelines for Computer Related Inventions let a claim drafted around an apparatus carry the software with it. Each round was answered in the consultation of its day.

Instances: 2006 · 2009 · 2012 · 2015
Form: Consultation responses and joint letters, with free-software groups, industry bodies, academics and lawyers
Record: Talks · open standards and patents, 2007 onward

2015 letter ↗

Action research

Reviewed while they were running

Each of these was reviewed during the adversarial phase of the project, while it was live and while the people running it were defending it. Where they refused to let it be inspected, it went to court.

2010 – 2018

Aadhaar

The authentication path, the federation of consumer portals around it, and the gap between a voluntary design and the mandates issued downstream. The exposure sat at the integration layer. Findings →

2017 – 2020

UPI · BHIM

The client permission surface, the consent terms, and what an identifier alone was sufficient to authorise. A payment stack with no public bug tracker has no route for a finding to become a fix. Findings →

2020 – 2021

Aarogya Setu

Disclosure and compulsion, taken to a forum that binds the operator. India was, as MIT Technology Review reported in May 2020, the only democracy making its contact-tracing app mandatory. Anivar A Aravind v. Ministry of Home Affairs & Ors. [W.P No. 7483 of 2020] — Karnataka High Court. In January 2021 the Union and NIC were restrained from sharing application data without user consent. Legal support from SFLC.in and the Human Rights Law Network. Case record ↗

2021

CoWIN

Vaccination registration reviewed as an access system: Aadhaar linkage on a platform that was not the only route to a dose, identity mismatches recorded against the person rather than the record, and a certificate treated as an entry pass. Reported in MediaNama and The News Minute; the joint statement on equitable access followed.