A growing class of services is sold by consumption but delivered without a meter. The buyer pays a fixed fee for an undisclosed quantity of an undefined unit, is not shown how much remains, and discovers the limit only by striking it — mid-task, without warning. This is not a complaint about price. We can pay for the gas. There is no gauge.
Require that metered digital services show the meter. Five obligations: declare the unit, display live usage, signal before the limit binds, no silent redefinition, and a reconcilable record.
The mechanism: federal acquisition guidance. The United States is among the largest buyers of these services. Conditioning federal purchase on metering disclosure requires no legislation, creates the compliance examples the market currently lacks, and establishes a de facto standard — the same path by which federal procurement has repeatedly set commercial norms. VALUE PREMISE
This is metrology, not AI policy. It regulates the dial, not the product: no capability rules, no training-data provisions, no content policy, no price controls. A seller may charge any price and set any limit. The requirement is that the buyer can see it.
The buyer who cannot observe remaining capacity cannot schedule around it. The only available hedge is to purchase duplicate subscriptions and rotate between them when one stops — paying two or three times for a single workload. DATA — first-person; prevalence unmeasured
The revenue from that duplicate provisioning accrues entirely to the seller, and the cost of the missing gauge falls entirely on the buyer. A seller therefore has no commercial reason to install a gauge. This is a textbook information asymmetry with a first-order transfer attached, and it is precisely the configuration in which disclosure has historically required a rule rather than competition. MODEL
Note the sharpest fact: the meter already exists. The seller must measure the quantity in order to enforce the limit. Nothing new must be built. The number is computed and then withheld from the party it is computed about. MODEL
WP-32 shows that when a party's constraint state is unobservable, its forced behaviour is indistinguishable from its preferences, and value transfers to the counterparty able to wait. Metered subscriptions are that structure with the roles explicit:
| Forced Urgency Gap (WP-32) | Metered digital service |
|---|---|
| household's liquidity state unobserved | remaining quota unobserved — by the buyer, not the seller |
| margin / LTV trigger fires without warning | throttle or cutoff fires without warning |
| forced sale at the worst moment | work abandoned mid-task; context lost |
| absorbed by the patient counterparty | absorbed as duplicate-subscription revenue |
Requiring an honest, visible measure is not novel regulation. It predates the republic and is administered today without controversy. DATA
None of these regulate the product. Each regulates the measure. The proposal here is a strict subset of what already applies to a gallon of gasoline.
| # | Obligation | Content |
|---|---|---|
| R1 | Declare the unit | Plain-language statement of the usage unit and what consumes it. Composite units must publish their conversion. |
| R2 | Show the gauge | Usage consumed, applicable limit, and time to reset — human- and machine-readable, no extra charge, ordinary interface. |
| R3 | Signal before binding | Notice before the limit binds, early enough to conclude or transfer work in progress. |
| R4 | No silent redefinition | Notice before any change to unit, limit, or accounting takes effect. A quota that shrinks silently is an undisclosed price increase. |
| R5 | Reconcilable record | On request, a usage record sufficient to verify the charge. An unreconcilable meter is not a meter. |
Safe harbour. A provider publishing R1 and exposing R2 through a documented API is presumed compliant with R3–R5 where that API supports them. Several providers already offer usage APIs, which establishes feasibility and disposes of the burden objection. DATA — verifiable now
The instinct is to specify tokens, minutes, or requests. Resist it. A unit-specific statute is obsolete at the next pricing change, and standard-setting of that kind advantages incumbents. Weights-and-measures law does not require that fuel be sold in gallons rather than litres — it requires that whatever unit is declared be measured accurately and displayed. The same posture here is technology-neutral and does not need reopening. MODEL
One question, mechanically checkable, revealing no trade secret: does the number shown to the subscriber match the number used to enforce the limit? Not model internals, not infrastructure cost, not architecture. Inspection on complaint — the weights-and-measures posture — rather than pre-approval or licensure, which is slow, capturable, and moat-building.
A provider may not enforce a usage limit — by throttling, suspending, degrading, or charging for excess — unless the meter and the advance notice were provided.
This is stronger and cheaper than a penalty schedule. It is self-executing: no agency action is required, and a provider's own counsel prices the risk immediately. It is proportionate: a provider that shows the gauge is entirely unaffected. And it is aligned to the harm — it removes the benefit of hiding the meter rather than taxing it. A fine is a cost of doing business; unenforceability is not. MODEL
Three companion clauses close the specific traps:
Why this is the right first move. The government is a large buyer, not a regulator, in this posture — the least contestable footing available. It produces working compliance examples, which is what the market lacks. It sidesteps preemption and dormant-commerce questions entirely. And it lets any state, city, or agency follow the same clause independently: Newark can adopt it for its own purchasing tomorrow, without waiting for anyone. VALUE PREMISE
| Phase | Instrument | Requires |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Procurement | acquisition guidance + contract clause | executive action only |
| 2 · Enforcement | unfair-practice authority (FTC Act §5 / state analogues) | existing authority |
| 3 · Standardization | NIST technical publication; state adoption | the Handbook 44 convergence path |
| 4 · Statute | codification, non-waivable | Congress or state legislature |
Most affected buyers are sole proprietors, small firms and professionals — the population many consumer-protection statutes exclude as commercial. A bill riding on consumer-protection authority may fail to cover the people it is written for. Two fixes: extend the protected class to small business below a threshold, or ground the duty in metering itself — a duty owed by anyone selling by measured quantity, irrespective of buyer status. The latter is the weights-and-measures posture and is cleaner. Add a non-waiver clause, or the act is drafted around by the terms of service it aims to reach. MODEL
"Usage is genuinely variable and hard to predict." Then disclose the variance. Electricity prices vary hourly and are still metered. Unpredictability is an argument for a gauge.
"Publishing the unit exposes infrastructure cost." R1 requires the unit as the buyer experiences it, not the seller's cost structure. A fuel pump displays gallons, not refinery margin.
"Providers will respond with harder caps." Possibly — and that is an improvement in kind. A disclosed limit can be planned against and compared across sellers. The status quo is not a generous limit; it is an unknown one.
"Users can track their own consumption." They cannot. The provider's accounting is the only authoritative record and is not exposed. This is exactly why the certified scale sits on the seller's counter rather than shoppers being told to bring their own.
"This burdens small providers." They already compute the quantity to enforce the limit. Exposing an already-computed number is the cheapest possible mandate; a revenue or subscriber threshold can exempt the smallest.
Claim-tagged in the manner of this corpus, so the gaps are visible:
The origin of this paper is first-person: three subscriptions run in rotation because none exposes a gauge, with the handoff between them consuming real working time. That is a motivating observation, not evidence, and is labelled as such. VALUE PREMISE
Parent: WP-32 · The Forced Urgency Gap — the identification result and the amplification theorem this memo applies to a new sector. Sibling: WP-35 · Retiring the Advisor, which applies the same mechanism to municipal housing extraction and uses the same procurement-first deployment logic. Method discipline: WP-31. No new formal results are claimed here; the contribution is the identification of a metrology gap and a route that requires no new authority to close it.
If you sell it by the tank, show the gauge.