On May 19, 2026, Buenos Aires Province deputy Ayelén Rasquetti (Fuerza Patria) introduced a bill to create a Provincial Registry of Digital Platforms (Registro Provincial de Plataformas Digitales). It would require any digital-commerce or social-commerce platform operating in the province — regardless of where it is legally domiciled — to disclose the variables, parameters, and decision rules behind its sales algorithms, covering order assignment, promotions, bonuses, and dynamic pricing, and to file algorithmic-model documentation, audit records, and the names of local technical and legal representatives (Parlamentario, May 19, 2026).
The problem is real
The strongest case for the bill is straightforward, and we should state it plainly. Dynamic pricing engines now reset the price of a product in real time based on signals the buyer never sees — demand, inventory, time of day, sometimes inferences about the individual shopper. As Rasquetti put it, platforms "use systems that automatically modify product values in real time, often harming consumers," and the absence of clear rules "leaves users vulnerable to discriminatory or inequitable practices." Social-commerce platforms such as TikTok Shop fold the storefront directly into an engagement-optimized feed, so the same ranking machinery that decides what video you watch increasingly decides what product you are shown and what you pay. A consumer who cannot see why a price moved cannot tell a legitimate supply signal from price steering. That is a genuine information asymmetry, and a legislature is entitled to address it.
The stakes are not trivial. Argentine e-commerce turned over roughly $35.3 trillion pesos in 2025, growing about 60% nominally against 31.5% inflation — real expansion in a contracting economy (Infobae, Feb. 6, 2026). When a channel grows that fast, opaque pricing scales with it.
Disclosure to consumers is the proportionate fix
The right remedy is to make the outputs of these systems legible to the people they affect. Tell a shopper, in plain language, that a price is dynamic and what categories of factors move it. Require that personalized pricing be labeled. Ban undisclosed individualized price discrimination. These obligations are enforceable through Argentina's existing consumer-protection framework, they impose no architectural redesign, and they put information where it does work — at the point of sale.
The European Union reached the same conclusion and stopped at the same line. Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, the Platform-to-Business Regulation, requires intermediation services to set out "the main parameters determining ranking and the reasons for the relative importance of those main parameters" (EUR-Lex, Reg. 2019/1150, Art. 5). Crucially, Article 5(6) explicitly does not require providers to disclose the algorithms themselves. The Commission's ranking-transparency guidelines reinforce that platforms must surface the key parameters behind ranking without handing over source code (European Commission). Europe — no friend of platform opacity — decided that disclosing parameters, not models, was enough to fix the asymmetry. The Rasquetti bill goes further than the EU and gets less for it.
Where the bill overshoots
Three design choices turn a sound goal into a disproportionate one.
First, filing the model is not the same as informing the consumer. Requiring platforms to deposit "algorithmic-model documentation" and "decision rules" with a provincial registry compels disclosure of trade secrets to a government office without putting a single additional fact in front of a shopper. The EU's parameter standard already protects consumers; a model-filing mandate mainly creates a new repository of commercially sensitive material to secure, leak, or subpoena. The marginal consumer benefit over plain-language disclosure is close to zero; the security and competitive risk is not.
Second, a province is the wrong jurisdiction. The bill asserts authority over platforms "regardless of where they are legally domiciled" and demands locally named representatives. National frameworks impose extraterritorial reach because a single national market justifies it; a single province inside a federal country is a different matter. If each of Argentina's 23 provinces and the City of Buenos Aires enacted its own registry, its own filing format, and its own representative mandate, a platform would face two dozen incompatible compliance regimes inside one country. That fragmentation is a barrier to entry that large incumbents absorb and smaller or foreign entrants do not — the opposite of a competitive, open market.
Third, the trigger is opacity, but the cure risks chilling iteration. Pricing and ranking models change constantly; that is how they improve. A standing obligation to file current decision rules with a regulator, on penalty, pushes firms toward fewer, slower, more legally defensible changes. We have watched adjacent debates conflate "we should regulate this" with "the evidence justifies this specific intervention" — the EFF recently warned that weak evidence is driving sweeping platform mandates elsewhere (EFF, May 13, 2026). Argentina should not import that pattern.
A better version of the same bill
The instinct is correct; the instrument is heavy. A proportionate redraft would keep the consumer-facing obligations — mandatory labeling of dynamic and personalized pricing, plain-language parameter disclosure on the EU model, and a ban on undisclosed individualized price discrimination — and drop the registry, the model-filing requirement, and the province-by-province representative mandate. Algorithmic audits, where warranted, belong with the national competition or consumer authority, conducted confidentially and triggered by evidence of harm, not deposited in advance with a sub-national office.
That version protects the same shopper, survives a trade-secret challenge, and does not splinter a national market into provincial compliance zones. Buenos Aires has correctly identified that dynamic pricing should not be a black box. The fix is to open the box to the consumer — not to mail a copy of the machine to the province.