A person must be more than a second click

To the Platform Council,

I support the Platform Fairness Standard. I am glad the Assembly adopted it on 13 August. Written notice, a specific reason, a review by a person and a limit on payout holds are not elaborate privileges. They are the minimum information a small business needs when an account action threatens its ability to keep operating.

I am writing about one clause: “review by a person.” I support the promise, but I object to leaving it at that. A person can be assigned to a review and still do nothing more than repeat the first decision. The Standard should say what kind of review is required.

On 6 May 2026, I found that my account with a large marketplace had been suspended. A payout of ARS 1,840,000 was also unavailable. That money was not a number on a dashboard to me. It was the amount I had counted on to meet the next set of bills. I could not tell from the notice what specific activity had triggered the suspension or whether the payout was being held for the same reason.

I tried to make the problem legible. On 7 May, I used the platform’s appeal channel and uploaded the documents it requested. I included invoices carrying my CUIT and records of the transactions in question. Those are the records I use to keep my paperwork in order here. On 12 May, I sent the same material again through the support channel because the appeal page did not show whether the attachments had been received. On 18 May, I asked my bank to confirm that the account details for receiving payouts had not changed. They had not. I also checked my records with the national tax agency, ARCA, so I could rule out a mismatch in the information I had supplied.

None of those steps told me who was looking at the case, what evidence they had considered, or what fact I could correct. I received updates that the case was under review, but no account-specific explanation. I do not know whether a person examined my documents. I cannot honestly say that no person did. That uncertainty is exactly the problem: a customer cannot distinguish an actual review from a status label.

By 2 June, the payout was still unavailable. I had spent hours collecting records and repeating the same explanation, while not knowing whether a new upload would reach someone able to act on it. I was not asking the platform to take my side automatically. If there was a real compliance concern, I wanted to understand it and answer it. What I needed was a route from the concern to the evidence, and from the evidence to a decision someone would own.

Here is the wording I ask the Council to use in its implementation guidance, or in any future revision of the Standard:

“A review must be conducted by a trained person who did not make the initial decision and is not simply confirming it. The reviewer must consider the business user’s submitted information, identify any remaining issue the user can address, and provide a reasoned outcome within a stated time limit. Where relevant, the platform must make a practical way available to submit information in a language the user can understand.”

This does not require the platform to disclose information that would create a genuine security risk, and it does not require an automatic reversal. It asks for a reviewer with enough separation and authority to test the first decision against the evidence. If the reviewer cannot change the outcome, request a missing document, or explain what remains unresolved, then “review by a person” may be only a human-shaped waiting room.

The local details matter. I work in pesos, submit records tied to my CUIT, and rely on an account whose information must match the records I keep here. A platform operating across borders may have good reasons to use common systems. But the person reviewing a case should be able to understand documents and identifiers from the country where the business operates, or tell the user clearly what equivalent evidence is acceptable. Otherwise, a global promise can fail at the point where a small business has to prove its own facts.