As early as 2017, executives at the ride-sharing platform Uber reportedly met with US Securities and Exchange Commission officials about granting company stock to their independent-contractor drivers.

By February 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that, with their initial public offerings approaching, Uber and its competitor Lyft found a way to work around SEC rules by issuing their drivers cash bonuses that recipients could choose to invest in stock.

User ownership could be a means, alongside appropriate regulation, of ensuring democratic self-governance and equitable profit-sharing from within companies themselves.

The time may be coming for a renaissance of ownership designs [24] to help address the crises of accountability in the online economy, which otherwise have no end in sight.

ESOPs were able to proliferate much faster and grow much larger, for instance, than worker cooperatives, which today in the United States number just several hundred, with several thousand employees among them.

Multi-sided online platforms frequently blur the roles of consumer and producer in the ambiguous designation of the user—who might be an app-based delivery worker, an amateur video creator on a social-media platform, a resident of an area with only one broadband provider, or a smartwatch wearer whose biometric data is collected in a profitable database

As a tool for delivering economic returns, a user trust could purchase shares on behalf of the vast majority of users who never would or could invest in the company with their own resources. As a mechanism of governance, such a trust could enable otherwise-atomized users and shareholders to speak with one voice on issues of common concern.

Consider Facebook, for instance. As a company now habitually embattled in accountability crises, it could be a valuable sign of goodwill to adopt a user governance regime with power at the level of a large bloc of shares and even board representation.

Nathan Schneider • User Trusts: Broad-Based Ownership for Online Platforms