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Combined all three under verification-monopoly.org with title: 'The Evaluation Harness — Collective Regression Suite as Certification Monopoly' Structure: (1) vision from monopoly, (2) service from harness, (3) spec from collective-regression. All three IDs preserved in PROPERTIES. Deleted evaluation-harness.org and collective-regression-suite.org.
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Competitive Barriers — Moats and Infrastructure Lock-in
Re-evaluated: time is not the primary moat. A Phase 4+ Passepartout fed on Wikipedia + Wikidata can build a general ontology in two weeks. The organic growth advantage collapses for general knowledge.
Actual moats (weaker than initially assumed):
- Domain-specific gate rules — thin. A few hundred lines of Lisp data. Write once, trivial to copy. Not a real moat.
- Empirical decision history — every HITL decision is a Merkle fact. A fresh instance has none. Makes your instance more valuable but doesn't prevent competition — it's a switching cost, not a barrier to entry.
- Evaluation harness (regression suite) — thousands of test cases accumulated from every bug fix. Cannot be ingested from public data. Strongest residual moat.
- Infrastructure integration — specific Docker compose layouts, Traefik patterns, Authentik configs encoded as gate rules. A competitor's infrastructure is different.
Strongest competitor strategy: Not copying your gate rules — offering the same architecture as a service with their own pre-seeded general knowledge and a consulting engagement to customize gate rules. The AGPL prevents closing the architecture but does not prevent offering it as a service with a customization layer.
The defensible business is services, not product. The defensible entity is "the organization that best understands how to adapt Passepartout to your domain" — not "the organization that owns Passepartout." A verification monopoly on agent safety would change this calculus — competitors would need independent certification. Patent strategy and Licensing protect key innovations and create revenue from the open-source ecosystem.
Infrastructure lock-in and switching costs
A hospital that runs Passepartout with HIPAA gate rules ($50K/yr) for five years has accumulated:
- A fact store with a decade of compliance decisions
- A proof forest of verified rules
- An empirical decision history tied to their specific deployment
- Customized gate rules encoding their specific workflows and approvals
Switching to a competitor means discarding all of it. The accumulated value grows as the fact store deepens. Annual revenue per enterprise grows from $250K in year one to $500K-$1M by year five as more domain packages are added.
This is the strongest residual moat. The evaluation harness (regression suite) is a close second — it grows with every deployment and cannot be ingested from public data. The verification monopoly and upgrade lifecycle compound this lock-in: every new regulation encoded as a gate rule deepens the proof forest, making the deployment harder to reproduce elsewhere.
(See the Social protocol infrastructure requirements for the network topology that creates this lock-in.)