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Platform Council
Open Letter to the Eight Mid-Sized Platforms Proposed for Wave 2
To: The leadership of Upwork, Fiverr, Payoneer, Commerce (formerly BigCommerce), Lightspeed, Toast, Faire and Wix
Proposed CEO seats: Hayden Brown, Upwork; Micha Kaufman, Fiverr; John Caplan, Payoneer; Travis Hess, Commerce; Dax Dasilva, Lightspeed; Aman Narang, Toast; Max Rhodes, Faire; and Avishai Abrahami, Wix.
From: Robert Nikic, Advisory Council Chair, Reseated Councils; and the Rapporteur of the Platform Council
Dear leaders,
We are writing before the next stage of Reseated’s work on platform fairness. We are inviting your organizations to take part in that work—not as a presumption of wrongdoing, and not as a request to accept every account in the evidence as complete or independently verified, but as an opportunity to examine a recurring operational problem from the perspective of the small businesses that rely on digital platforms.
Reseated is a global assembly of small-business owners, organized in seven councils. The Platform Council examines practices affecting businesses that sell, work, receive payments, advertise or otherwise operate through platforms. Our members are anonymous unless they choose to occupy a public seat. Their businesses are not identified in our reports, and we do not ask members to disclose a business name in order to be heard.
Our mandate is procedural and practical. We collect reports; test whether a reported problem shows volume, frequency, consistency, spread and corroboration; draft a proposed response; consult publicly; and submit a
text to an Assembly ballot. When a standard is adopted, we send it to the leaders who can put it into practice and track each seat as proposed, letter sent, delivered, replied, signed or empty. We distinguish evidence of a repeated pattern from a finding about any individual company. We do not claim that every report describes the same process, that every account is complete, or that a member’s experience establishes a legal violation.
The Platform Fairness Standard, adopted by the Founders Assembly on 13 August 2026, is our first adopted platform standard. It asks that before an account suspension, listing removal, payout hold or fee change, a business receive written notice, a specific reason, review by a person and, for payout holds, a time limit. It also asks for the same protections in every country in which a platform operates. The Assembly adopted the Standard with 86.4 per cent voting in favour, on 58 per cent turnout. The standard is a voluntary practice proposal; it does not replace applicable law or the judgment of a competent authority.
What the evidence says—and does not say
As of 19 October 2026, Reseated had 1,739 members in 49 countries and had received 5,331 reports from 50 countries. The reports are organized by the council issue areas through which they were submitted: Platform, 1,961; Cashflow, 1,347; Fair Play, 686; Trade, 517; Resilience, 350; Red Tape, 298; and Team, 172. These are report counts, not estimates of the prevalence of a problem across all small businesses. Our current records do not provide a reliable industry-by-industry breakdown of the reporters, so we do not present the counts as sector-wide rates.
The Platform Council had 511 members from 49 countries and 1,961 reports from 50 countries. The median amount reported as at stake was approximately US$4,102. In the Platform Council records, 1,097 reports described an account suspension and 864 described funds being held. These categories may overlap in a member’s experience; they should not be read as mutually exclusive totals. There were 68 Platform Council reports filed in the 30 days before the data date.
The highest report counts by country were the United States, 233; Germany, 119; Brazil, 115; the Philippines, 106; Mexico, 104; Spain, 100; the United Kingdom, 92; and France, 89. These figures describe the reports received, not the number of affected businesses in each country. They should not be used to compare platform performance across jurisdictions without information about the number and type of platform users in each market.
Among Platform Council reporters, 36 per cent described their team as just themselves, 43 per cent as two to nine people, 17 per cent as 10 to 49 people and 4 per cent as 50 to 249 people. This is one reason notice and review matter. A restriction or delayed payout can remove the ability to sell or to meet obligations at a moment when there may be no separate compliance, legal or customer-service team to absorb the disruption.
The numbers alone do not resolve the details of any one case. A platform may need to act quickly to address fraud, safety, legal requirements or risks to other users. A notice may need to protect an investigation or another person’s privacy. Our request is not that platforms refrain from taking necessary action. It is that, where an action materially affects a business user, the user should ordinarily be told what happened and why, have a meaningful route to human review, and know when held funds will be reconsidered or released. When immediate action is necessary, a prompt explanation and review after the action can still make the process more accountable.
Legal and policy context
The operating rules differ by jurisdiction and by the service involved. We do not suggest that one legal rule applies identically to all eight organizations, or that the standards below determine the legal status of any particular service. They do show that written reasons, disclosure and clarity around payment restrictions are established subjects of policy and regulation.
In the European Union, the Platform-to-Business Regulation requires a provider, when restricting or suspending a business user, to provide a statement of reasons. It also provides for at least 30 days’ notice before termination of the whole service, subject to the regulation’s terms and exceptions.1 The Digital Services Act requires statements of reasons for specified moderation decisions and includes information on whether automated means were used. Its Transparency Database makes statements of reasons publicly accessible; the European Commission’s information page reports that the database has been operating since September 2023 and contains more than three billion statements.2 These rules concern defined services and circumstances. We are not asserting that every provision applies to every service named in this letter.
In Japan, the Act on Improving Transparency and Fairness of Specified Digital Platforms applies to designated platforms. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s information identifies designated online malls, including Amazon Japan, Rakuten Ichiba and Yahoo! Shopping, with Qoo10 subsequently added. The Act includes disclosure requirements concerning conditions for withholding payments, among other matters.3 We cite this framework as a case of a policy approach to clarity around payment conditions, not as a claim that any recipient named in this letter is covered by the designation.
More broadly, the scale of small business makes the quality of these processes consequential. The United Nations estimates that micro, small and medium-sized enterprises account for about 90 per cent of businesses, 60–70 per cent of employment and around 50 per cent of GDP worldwide.4 The International Labour Organization estimates that MSMEs provide about 70 per cent of employment worldwide and that roughly 80 per cent operate in the informal economy.5 These global estimates are not measurements of platform dependence. They are a reminder that rules designed for business users affect a large and diverse part of economic life.
Our requests
We ask each of the eight organizations to consider the following steps. They are written to allow for differences among business models, legal obligations and risk controls, while setting a clear baseline for the treatment of business users.
Publish a business-user process. Provide an accessible explanation of how account suspension, listing removal, payout holds and fee changes are initiated, communicated, reviewed and closed. Identify the channels through which a business user can receive a notice and request review, including what to do if ordinary account access is unavailable.
Give a specific written reason. When a significant restriction or change affects a business user, state the action taken and the relevant reason with enough detail to make a response possible. A generic reference to “policy” or “risk” is not a substitute for an intelligible explanation. Where detail must temporarily be withheld for a legitimate reason, say that information is limited and explain, when possible, when the decision will be reviewed again.
Provide review by a person. Offer a route to review by a person with authority to reconsider the decision. Explain how the business can submit relevant information, how it can identify an error in the underlying record, and how it will be told the result. Automated systems may assist a process; a business user should not be left without a meaningful way to raise a case for human consideration.
Set and communicate time limits for payout holds. At the point funds are held, tell the business what amount is affected, the reason or category of reason, the next review date and the steps that may resolve the hold. If the hold continues, provide an updated explanation and a new review date. State a clear outer limit where the platform can do so, subject to applicable law and identified exceptions.
Give advance notice of fee changes where practicable. Explain the change, its effective date and the business users or transactions affected. Where advance notice is not possible, provide a prompt explanation and an accessible route to ask questions or raise an error.
Apply the protections consistently across markets. Use a common baseline for business users in every country where the platform operates, while meeting or exceeding any stronger local requirement. If a local rule requires a different process, explain the difference plainly rather than leaving users to infer which protections apply.
Publish aggregate process information. Consider reporting, at suitable intervals, the number and broad categories of business-user restrictions, the use of automated decision-making, the number of reviews requested and resolved, and typical time to review or release held funds. Define the measures, protect user privacy and explain limitations so that figures can be understood and compared over time.
Designate a contact for this dialogue. Identify a team or office able to discuss business-user safeguards and evidence with the Platform Council. We would welcome a written response explaining which requests your organization can support, which require adaptation, and what information would help you assess the remainder.
Evidence, privacy and next steps
We can offer anonymized and aggregated data to support an informed discussion. Subject to appropriate safeguards and a clear purpose, the Council can discuss the categories used in reporting, the pattern-test process and aggregate findings. We will not disclose the identity of a member or their business without that member’s informed consent. We will not present a member’s account as a verified finding about a named organization, and we will not ask a platform to identify a reporter.
Our evidence process is designed to test patterns, not to turn unreviewed individual reports into a verdict. For PL-001, the Council certified that the five-part pattern test—Volume, Frequency, Consistency, Spread and Corroboration—was met. A public consultation on the draft Standard received 487 comments before the Assembly vote. The adopted text and the consultation process are available in our records. We welcome questions about methodology, including questions that would help distinguish product types, user groups or different causes of a restriction.
The eight proposed Wave 2 seats extend the conversation to a group of mid-sized platforms with different services and business-user relationships. The seats were proposed on 29 September 2026. Letters to the proposed recipients are scheduled for 17 November 2026. This open letter is an invitation ahead of that scheduled contact: please nominate a suitable point of contact, review the requests and tell us where the evidence or wording needs clarification.
Our standard does not ask you to agree that every reported experience is accurate or to disclose confidential operational information. It asks for processes that make significant decisions understandable, contestable and time-bounded. Businesses can accept that platforms must enforce rules and still expect to know which rule was applied, what they can do next and when their funds will be reviewed. We believe those expectations are compatible with effective safety, integrity and service operations.
We would be glad to discuss the evidence and the proposed safeguards with your teams. A response need not endorse every part of the Standard to be useful. A specific account of what your organization already does, what it is willing to improve and what constraints it faces would help make the next stage of this work more precise.
Respectfully,
Robert NikicAdvisory Council Chair, Reseated Councils
RapporteurPlatform CouncilReseated
Annex: Sources and records
European Union, Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, including Article 4 on restrictions and suspension of business users and notice of termination of the whole service.
Reseated record: RC/PL/2026/1, Call for evidence: Platform Council agenda item PL-001; RC/PL/2026/N.2, Certification of the pattern test for PL-001; RC/PL/2026/RES/2026/1, Resolution adopted by the Founders Assembly: the Platform Fairness Standard.
European Commission, Digital Services Act Transparency Database: questions and answers.
Reseated record: RC/PL/2026/L.1/Rev.1, Revised draft resolution: the Platform Fairness Standard.
Japan Act on Improving Transparency and Fairness of Specified Digital Platforms; Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Digital Platforms information page.
United Nations, Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Day.
International Labour Organization, Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises.
Notes and sources
Sources
This document has no standing until adopted under the Founders Charter. Reseated Councils is not affiliated with the United Nations.