Why Governments Should Own the Infrastructure

The instinct is to let markets build disclosure infrastructure. The problem is that markets build for the buyer with the most purchasing power, not for the governance system with the broadest mandate. Health-relevant food information is a public good. Public goods require public infrastructure — or at minimum, a public layer that private systems can plug into.

“A disclosure system that is privately owned can be privately withdrawn. Infrastructure that affects public health decisions should not be at the discretion of a commercial entity.”

When disclosure infrastructure is privately owned, its long-term availability is contingent on commercial viability. Systems that cannot attract sufficient revenue are discontinued. Regulatory dependencies on discontinued systems create governance gaps that are costly to repair and difficult to explain to the public institutions that relied on them.

The question is not whether private actors can build effective disclosure systems. Many have. The question is whether the governance layer — the part that regulators, procurement bodies, and health authorities depend on — should be subject to commercial risk. The answer is no. The institutional layer should be publicly owned, interoperable, and persistent. Private systems can coexist with, and build on top of, that layer.

Several precedents exist. Financial reporting infrastructure — the standards, the taxonomies, the interoperability requirements — is publicly governed even where private actors implement it. Environmental disclosure frameworks follow the same model. Food information governance has not yet arrived at this architecture. The current landscape is a collection of private systems with inconsistent coverage and no shared layer. That is the gap that needs filling.