Skills as Public Infrastructure, Not Platform Assets Why Skills Must Be Treated Like the Internet or GPS Open, Neutral, and Public

1. The Core Claim (No Warm-Up, No Apologies)

Skills are not content.
Skills are not profiles.
And they are absolutely not assets that platforms get to own, lock, rent, or revoke.

Skills are infrastructure.

If that sounds radical, it’s only because the industry has spent the last two decades normalizing a bad assumption: that platforms are entitled to sit between people and their abilities. That assumption is wrong and it’s breaking the global labor market.

When something is essential for participation in society, it cannot be privately owned without consequences. The internet proved this. GPS proved this. Skills are next.

2. Why the Platform Model Is Fundamentally Broken

Platforms treat skills like proprietary data because it benefits them, not because it benefits workers.

Here’s what the platform model actually does:

• Your skills exist only inside a company’s database
• Verification is opaque and revocable
• Portability is artificially limited
• Value accrues to the platform, not the individual

This creates structural dependency.
Lose access to the platform, and you lose visibility of your own competence.

That’s not innovation. That’s feudalism with better UI.

3. Infrastructure vs Platforms: The Non-Negotiable Difference

Let’s be precise.

Infrastructure has these properties:

• Neutral
• Open standards
• Interoperable
• Non-rivalrous
• Not permissioned by a single actor

Platforms are:

• Centralized
• Incentivized to lock-in
• Designed to extract rent
• Account-based, not capability-based

The internet does not belong to Google.
GPS does not belong to Apple Maps.
Email does not belong to Gmail.

They all run on top of public infrastructure.

Skills must work the same way.

4. Skills Are a Coordination Layer, Not a Product

Skills are the shared language between:

• Workers
• Employers
• Educators
• AI systems
• Governments
• Credentialing bodies

Once you understand this, the conclusion is unavoidable:

A coordination layer cannot be privately owned without distorting the entire system.

When skills are platform-owned:

• Hiring becomes biased toward visibility, not ability
• Education optimizes for credentials, not competence
• AI systems learn from skewed, siloed data
• Workers are forced to rebuild identity repeatedly

This is not a scaling problem.
This is a structural design failure.

5. Why “Just Use Open APIs” Is a Weak Answer

Platforms love to say:

“We support openness via APIs.”

That’s cosmetic openness.

APIs do not solve:

• Ownership
• Governance
• Verifiability
• Long-term persistence
• Power asymmetry

If a platform can:

• Change the rules
• Revoke access
• Reinterpret data
• Monetize downstream usage

Then the infrastructure is still private just with better marketing.

6. Skills as Public Infrastructure: What That Actually Means

Treating skills as public infrastructure requires hard constraints, not slogans.

A real system would enforce:

• Self-sovereign skill ownership
  Skills are bound to the individual, not the app.
• Open skill graphs
  Relationships between skills are public and composable.
• Decentralized verification
  Evidence is attestable by multiple independent actors.
• Portable reputation
  Trust travels with the skill, not the platform.
• Machine-readable by default
  So AI can reason over skills without platform mediation.

Anything less is just rebranded centralization.

7. The AI Problem Makes This Urgent, Not Optional

AI systems don’t care about profiles.
They care about structured, verifiable signals.

If skills remain platform-owned:

• AI becomes dependent on a handful of data monopolies
• Labor markets become algorithmically gated
• Skill inference replaces skill proof
• Bias gets automated at scale

Public skill infrastructure flips this:

• AI reasons over open skill graphs
• Verification is evidence-based
• Matching improves without surveillance
• Individuals retain leverage

If we don’t fix this layer, AI will amplify the worst parts of today’s system.

8. Governance: Who Controls Public Skill Infrastructure?

Not platforms.
Not governments alone.
Not corporations.

Public infrastructure requires:

• Open standards bodies
• Transparent governance
• Multi-stakeholder validation
• Cryptographic guarantees
• Legal neutrality

This is closer to how the internet evolved than how startups scale and that’s exactly the point.

Infrastructure is slow, boring, and durable.
Platforms are fast, fragile, and disposable.

Skills need durability.

9. The Hard Truth Platforms Won’t Say Out Loud

Platforms do not want skills to be public infrastructure.

Because once skills are:

• Portable
• Verifiable
• Interoperable

Platforms lose their leverage.

They can still compete but on service quality, not captivity.

That’s not anti-business.
That’s anti-rent-seeking.

10. Final Line (No Soft Landing)

The future of work cannot be built on privately owned representations of human capability.

Skills are not assets to be mined.
They are signals society depends on.

Like roads.
Like electricity.
Like the internet.

And infrastructure by definition must belong to everyone, or it will eventually fail everyone.

Source : Medium.com