Century-Scale Systems: What Land Registries Teach Us About Data Sovereignty

Abstract

Most technology is designed for a product lifecycle. A land registry is designed for a civilization lifecycle. This paper draws five lessons on data sovereignty from century-scale systems: sovereignty is a property of the record rather than the data centre; every dependency is a future liability with a date you don't know; the audit trail is part of the asset; sovereignty requirements now extend to AI inference and context; and trust, not data, is the actual product a registry delivers. Part of the Sovereign Digital Resilience series.