Originally published on Thomas’s Substack. Reproduced from the supplied publication export. Statements and patent-status references reflect the original publication date.
Editorial introduction · added September 17, 2026
Before you read
Selling compute capacity and governing an authorized interaction describe different commercial positions. Using a toll-booth analogy, this essay argues that a session can contain multiple countable governance events across providers. SSOAR supplies the proposed architectural basis for that position. The revenue and durability argument is a commercialization thesis to examine, not evidence of an established market or assured return.
SSOAR means Session-Scoped Orthogonal Authority and Routing.
Why read it?
- Strategic buyers and investors
- Evaluate the proposed unit of value separately from ownership of compute infrastructure.
- Telecom and platform leaders
- Explore whether governance of cross-provider events fits their commercial role.
This introduction is separate from the original essay.
Go to the original essay ↓
Every infrastructure transition follows the same shape.
The system’s underlying behavior changes. The legacy pricing unit becomes a poor fit for the new behavior. A new entrant prices the new unit. The incumbent that holds the legacy unit gets commoditized to a layer beneath the one where the new economy forms. The transition is
The
Toke
Boot
HIGHWAYS CARRY TRAFFIC. SESSIONS DEFINE THE TOLL.
"The entity that prices the new unit captures the new economy."
THOMAS ROCHA Ill
recognizable in hindsight and predictable in advance, because the pattern is older than the technology.
Telegraph priced messages by the word. The unit fit the underlying behavior of operator keying. When circuit-switched voice arrived, the unit became the duration of a connected circuit. AT&T priced minutes and captured the economic surface for the better part of a century. Western Union held per-word pricing for telegrams and watched the product collapse into a niche.
Long-distance voice was priced by the minute. The unit fit the underlying behavior of dedicated circuits. When packet-switched IP arrived, the unit became the packet. Skype, Vonage, and the over-the- top providers priced data transport. The legacy carriers spent two decades resisting the transition and lost most of their long-distance revenue to companies that priced based on what the system was actually producing.
Software priced licenses. The unit fit the underlying behavior of installed binaries on customer hardware. When the cloud arrived, the unit became active use. Salesforce, Slack, and the SaaS category priced subscription access. Oracle and the perpetual-license vendors had to convert or lose the customer relationship.
Cloud compute priced virtual machine hours. The unit fit the underlying behavior of provisioned capacity. When serverless arrived, the unit became the function execution. Lambda and the per-request providers priced what the system actually produced. The VM-hour business is still real and lucrative. It also is not where the next economic surface formed.
The pattern is consistent. The entity that prices the new unit captures the new economy. The entity that holds the old unit does not necessarily go away. It gets reduced to a layer beneath the surface where the rent now accrues.
The AI economy is in the next transition right now, and the position on the new surface is forming clearly enough that the structural distinction between it and the current surface can be described in plain terms.
The current move is a highway, not a booth
Tokens are the unit at the inference layer. Anthropic, OpenAI, and the model providers have priced them. Telecom operators are repositioning to price at scale, using sovereign distribution, partner compute, and existing subscriber relationships as their moat. The economic case has been written persuasively in the trade press. The numbers are large. A single H100, generating roughly eighteen thousand dollars a year as bare-metal compute, can generate roughly one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year when priced as token throughput, and the next generation of accelerated compute extends the multiple. The carriers who execute the transition well will capture meaningful revenue.
That transition is real. It is also a highway.
A highway carries traffic. The owner is compensated for the volume that crosses, the speed at which it crosses, and the capacity of the infrastructure that supplies it. The economics are scale economics. The competition is on cost per mile and the geographic footprint of the asphalt. The margins compress as each generation of underlying technology delivers more throughput per unit of capital, which means the highway owner has to keep building more highway to keep growing the revenue. The asset is real. The position is not as durable as the rent on a different layer.
A booth is something else. A booth does not own the road. It does not carry the traffic. It sits at a point on the road where the system must recognize that a crossing has occurred, charge a fee for it, record the crossing, and decide whether it was permitted at all. The economics are not scale economics. They are rent economics. A booth captures a percentage on every crossing regardless of which road the traffic came
from, which means the booth’s revenue grows with the volume of all the roads that feed it, rather than only with the road the booth is operating on.
The booth is the durable position. The highway is the capital-intensive supply.
In the AI economy currently forming, the highways are visible. The carriers, the hyperscalers, the model providers, and the compute infrastructure vendors are all extending their highways. They are building more capacity, refining their metering, and competing on cost per token. The economic case for the highway business is real, and capital is correctly flowing to operate highways at scale.
The booth is not visible yet. It is forming at a different layer, and that is where the next economic surface will sit.
Where the booth sits
A real-time AI interaction is not one inference call. It is a sequence of participants entering and exiting a live session, drawing on different resources, attaching different obligations, settling against different ledgers.
Take a concrete example. A bank conducts a fraud review with a customer over a real-time interaction. Voice from a carrier. AI from an enterprise-licensed model provider. Identity verification from a third- party security vendor. Residency routing from a regional cloud. Captioning from an accessibility service. An audit record that has to satisfy a regulator in a specific jurisdiction. Six vendors. Six invoices. No instrument can price the interaction as a single event, and no architectural primitive treats the interaction as a single governed transaction.
The carrier counts minutes. The model provider counts tokens. The captioning service counts streaming hours. The identity provider counts verification events. The cloud counts compute. The auditor counts retention. Each vendor operates its own highway and prices its own unit. None of them is operating a booth, because no booth exists at the layer where the interaction itself becomes an economic event.
The interaction itself is the next economic surface, and a single interaction is not a single event. Inside the same session, the booth recognizes the admission of the customer under one authority, the admission of the analyst under another, the residency crossing when a fraud specialist joins from a different jurisdiction, the entitlement check on the model invocation against the customer’s plan and the bank’s enterprise license and the regulator’s policy at the same time, the attestation event when the identity proof clears, the accessibility obligation attaching when the captioner joins and detaching when it leaves, the binding of the audit record to a specific evidence window, and the closure of the obligation set when the session ends. Six vendors on the highway side. A larger number of governed crossings on the booth side, all bound to the same session identity.
The booth at that surface answers questions that the highways cannot. Was the participant admitted to this interaction under the right authority? Did the interaction cross a residency boundary that requires the data to stay in a specific jurisdiction? Was the model invocation entitled under the customer’s plan, the bank’s enterprise license, and the regulator’s policy at the same time? Did the audit record bind the right evidence to the right session? Did the obligations close cleanly when the interaction ended, or did some participant leave the system in an unbounded state that the next interaction will inherit?
None of those questions is answered by counting tokens. None of them is answered by metering minutes, streaming hours, compute, or verification events. Each is an interaction-level question that requires an interaction-level primitive to answer, and that primitive does not exist in
deployed systems today. Each is also a discrete, recordable event with a counterparty and a moment in time, which is to say each is a billable crossing.
That primitive is the booth. The booth recognizes, governs, records, and settles each crossing within every interaction that passes through it, regardless of which highways the participants use. The carrier still owns its highway. The model provider still owns its inference factory. The cloud still owns its compute. The booth sits orthogonal to all of them and operates at a layer no highway owns. Rent is what the booth produces as a consequence of doing those four things at that layer.
That is where durable rent forms.
Why the booth is durable when the highway is not
The historical pattern says that booths outlast highways. Two reasons make this true, and both apply directly to the AI economy.
The first reason is that booth economics scale with the total volume of all the highways that feed them, while highway economics scale only with the volume of the one road the highway operator owns. A carrier with a great network captures the traffic on that network. A booth at the interaction layer captures a percentage on every interaction that crosses, regardless of which carrier, cloud, model provider, or service vendor supplied the components. The booth’s revenue grows with the total AI economy. The highway’s revenue grows with one segment of it.
The second reason is that booth economics are protected from the commoditization that eventually hits every infrastructure layer. The carriers that priced minutes did not lose the business because AT&T was poorly run. They lost the surface because packet-switched IP delivered better unit economics, and the customer arbitraged the difference. The same pattern will hit the token-throughput economy. Each generation of accelerated compute will deliver more tokens per dollar, compressing
the price per token and reducing the absolute revenue per unit of infrastructure even as the infrastructure becomes more capable. The highway owner has to build more highway just to stay even.
The booth is not subject to that compression. The booth charges on the act of crossing, not on the underlying capacity. As the highways get cheaper and more capable, more traffic crosses the booth, and the booth’s revenue grows. The same technology shifts that compress highway margins also increase booth revenue, because they produce more interactions that require the booth to function. The booth is countercyclical to the commoditization that affects everything else in the AI stack.
The closest historical analogue is the payment card networks, with one structural refinement. Visa and Mastercard do not issue cards, do not run bank accounts, do not provide goods, and do not own merchants. They mediate the four-party transaction. Their economic position is rent on every settlement that crosses their network. Every technology shift that has made commerce faster, cheaper, or more accessible has generated more transactions for card networks to process. The networks’ revenue has compounded over decades, while the underlying technologies they run on have completely turned over several times.
The refinement is this. A card settlement is one event per purchase. A governed AI session is closer in shape to a customs and clearinghouse function, where a single shipment generates dutiable events at multiple checkpoints (entry, transshipment, declaration, release), all bound to one manifest under one governing authority. The booth’s per-session yield is therefore a function of governance density, not session count. Highway revenue scales with traffic volume. Booth revenue scales with the number of governed events per interaction, which rises as interactions accrete more participants, more jurisdictions, more attached obligations, and more autonomous agents. The same trends that are making AI interactions more complex are increasing the number of crossings per session, and the booth captures rent on each of them.
The AI economy is at the pre-network moment. The booth has not been deployed as a recognized economic surface. The economic surface where the rent will accrue has not been claimed. The position is forming now, and it is structurally distinct from the highway capital that is currently absorbing most of the visible investment.
The booth is orthogonal to the highway
The architectural property that makes the booth possible is orthogonality.
The booth does not sit on any one highway. It sits at the interaction layer, perpendicular to whichever highway the interaction uses. A session can run across a telco circuit, a hyperscaler region, a sovereign cloud, an edge compute node, a satellite link, or any combination of these. The booth recognizes the interaction regardless of which highway carries the traffic. The same architectural primitive works for a bank fraud review over a carrier network, a healthcare consultation over a private cloud, a customer service interaction over a public hyperscaler, or any other configuration of participants and transports.
That orthogonality is what makes the booth’s economics work. If the booth were stacked on one specific highway, it would be a feature of that highway, and its revenue would be limited to the traffic that highway carried. Because the booth is orthogonal to all of them, every highway feeds it, and every governed crossing inside every interaction that uses any highway produces revenue for the booth.
Operationally, this means the booth is not built by extending a highway upward. The carriers building token-priced inference cannot become the booth by adding more sophisticated metering to their throughput products, because the metering still operates at the highway layer. The model providers building agent frameworks cannot become the booth by extending their inference products to include orchestration, because orchestration still operates in their tier. Cloud platforms building
institutional operating systems cannot become the booth by adding more workflow capabilities, because the workflow remains within their platform boundary.
The booth is a different architectural primitive. It has to be specified, built, and maintained as a layer orthogonal to the entire highway stack. The session is the interaction. Orthogonality is what makes the booth possible. Authority and routing are what the booth governs at the moment of each crossing within the session.
That is the technical content of the booth. The commercial content is what the booth produces: rent on every governed crossing within every interaction that passes through it, growing with the volume of every highway that feeds it and with the governance density of every session, protected from the commoditization that affects every highway underneath it.
The two positions are different assets
The current move toward token-priced inference is a highway move. It is real, lucrative for the operators who execute it well, and the appropriate position for institutions whose existing assets and capabilities make them natural highway operators. Telcos, hyperscalers, model providers, and compute infrastructure vendors are correctly investing in their highways. Those investments will produce returns.
The booth is a different asset. It is not built by extending a highway. It is not produced by owning more of the underlying capacity. It is specified at the architectural layer where interactions become economic events, and where the multiple governed crossings inside each interaction become countable, recordable, and billable. The two assets coexist. They are not substitutes for each other, nor stages of each other. A highway business and a booth business are different kinds of positions, and the institutional posture, capital structure, and strategic horizon that produce one differ from those that produce the other.
The structural distinction matters at this moment in the transition because the highway position is already legible in the market, whereas the booth position is not. The architectural primitive can be defined. The structure through which the position can be held is taking shape. The path by which the position becomes available is beginning to appear. None of these is visible yet to a market that is still measuring the AI economy in highway terms.
The pattern is older than the technology
Every infrastructure transition produces the same set of choices. The entity that prices the new unit captures the new economy. The entities that hold the old unit reposition to the new layer or accept commoditization. The new layer is claimed early or claimed late, and the positions claimed early compound across decades.
Telegraph to voice. Voice to packet. License to SaaS. VM to serverless. Each transition rewarded the recognition of the new unit and the new layer before the rest of the market had named them. The recognition that arrived after the consensus had formed was buying into the new layer at the price the early movers had already set.
The AI economy is at that moment now. Tokens are the visible unit at the highway layer. The booth at the interaction layer is the next surface, and it collects on each governed crossing within the session, not on the session as a single event. The position is forming. The architectural primitive that defines the position is specified. The structure through which the position can be held is already taking shape. The pattern is the same pattern that produced the durable rent on every infrastructure layer of the modern economy.
The booth is where durable rent forms.
The highway carries the traffic that the booth charges for.
Highways are expensive to build and easy to commoditize. Booths recognize, govern, record, and settle every crossing inside every session that runs over whatever highways exist, and they collect a percentage on each one.
That is the asset.