They buy their own IP range, establish their own AS, and pay for peering/bandwidth as an independent network and not as a single user/customer on someone else's

They buy their own IP range, establish their own AS, and pay for peering/bandwidth as an independent network and not as a single user/customer on someone else's network. This is fairly straightforward to do, but requires more commitment than renting some CPU time and bandwidth on someone else's machine.