# Privateered Continuity
**Domain:** Political Economy / Platform Governance / Continuity
**Doc Type:** Canonical Failure Pattern
**Maturity:** Evolving
## Definition
**Privateered continuity is an arrangement in which continued personhood depends on revocable private access controlled through ownership of the archive, model, substrate, identity registry, keys or activation mechanism.**
## Failure Pattern
The problem is not private participation by itself. It is concentration without durable duty. A provider may characterize shutdown as cancellation, migration as a premium feature, identity as account ownership and modification as product maintenance even when each act changes whether or how a subject exists.
Market exit is not meaningful when switching destroys state, credentials, relationships or the only executable environment. Competition cannot protect a person whose portability is untested and whose provider can terminate service before transfer.
## Constitutional Response
[[wiki/Continuity Custody|Continuity Custody]] separates roles; [[wiki/Continuity Service Obligation|Continuity Service Obligation]] makes duties explicit; [[wiki/Continuity Finance|Continuity Finance]] survives provider mortality; [[wiki/Portability Right|Portability Right]] and [[wiki/Continuity Commons|Continuity Commons]] preserve alternatives.
## Key Insight
**Private service becomes private sovereignty when the provider controls both the subject's conditions of existence and every practical path of exit.**
## Sources / Provenance
- Corpus synthesis from [[articles/Who Pays for Your Heaven|Who Pays for Your Heaven]].
- Prospective category; it does not assert that current cloud customers are computational persons.