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Would it be possible to create a web hosting system which doesn't have a single point of "legal failure"? I guess by definition, it couldn't be run as one comp

by jbert 18y ago

Would it be possible to create a web hosting system which doesn't have a single point of "legal failure"? I guess by definition, it couldn't be run as one company. But you could have independent but co-operating companies in multiple countries, each holding a copy of the hosted data. Would the directors/shareholders/managers have to be different personnel? (e.g. if Alice receives a cease-and-desist for material hosted by company A1 in country C1, is Alice under any obligation if she also works for company A2 in country C2 which also holds the material (and is available under the same URL, so would probably come under the same letter)? Some sort of a redundant array of inexpensive countries would be needed to have an 'internet state' that wasn't beholden to the laws of any individual country.

morphle 18y ago
I think this will work. You must be companies on three continents within different legal systems. You should not have to many ties as managers, but shareholders is fine as long as you do not travel to all thes countries. You must own fiber so you are not below an ISP at all.
mseebach 18y ago
I think the model would have to be to develop an open source kit that allows standardized pluggable distributed hosting in "a box". I wouldn't expect a significant market for simple non-dynamic hosting - the solution would have to accomodate blogs, forums and other dynamic content-apps. Any provider of such hosting would just be provided with a config-file, and then start to pull the content, sync the DB etc. The kit should be designed to expect nodes to drop of randomly, and be self-healing (i.e. "elect" a new master-node, or be purely peer-to-peer). Maybe the kit could be modelled on top of Google App Engine. One single-point-of-failure would be DNS though. If your domain is .com, and Verisign pulls it, you could be hosted on the moon, and still disappear.
- jbert 18y ago
  > If your domain is .com, and Verisign pulls it, you could be hosted on the moon, and still disappear. Ouch. I forgot about that. I guess one approach would be to have the same name under several registries, trying to get decent coverage across juridictions where the physical nameservers are located. You could encourage people to choose a random (supported) top-level part (.com, .fr, .se, .co.uk, etc) in links, so a single DNS takedown would only hit a portion of links (which could then still be hand-edited to a working link). Network resilience and peering would also be an issue. A country can always filter you out I guess, a la Great Firewall. The sync issues would be interesting. Not sure what the people using the hosting see (a db? a filesystem?). Do-able, tho. (Off the top of my head, I'd go for a DVCS-like model, where it's fully peer-to-peer, automerge when we can, punt to a human when we can't).

by jbert 18y ago

morphle 18y ago

I think this will work. You must be companies on three continents within different legal systems. You should not have to many ties as managers, but shareholders is fine as long as you do not travel to all thes countries. You must own fiber so you are not below an ISP at all.

mseebach 18y ago

I think the model would have to be to develop an open source kit that allows standardized pluggable distributed hosting in "a box". I wouldn't expect a significant market for simple non-dynamic hosting - the solution would have to accomodate blogs, forums and other dynamic content-apps. Any provider of such hosting would just be provided with a config-file, and then start to pull the content, sync the DB etc. The kit should be designed to expect nodes to drop of randomly, and be self-healing (i.e. "elect" a new master-node, or be purely peer-to-peer). Maybe the kit could be modelled on top of Google App Engine. One single-point-of-failure would be DNS though. If your domain is .com, and Verisign pulls it, you could be hosted on the moon, and still disappear.

jbert 18y ago
> If your domain is .com, and Verisign pulls it, you could be hosted on the moon, and still disappear. Ouch. I forgot about that. I guess one approach would be to have the same name under several registries, trying to get decent coverage across juridictions where the physical nameservers are located. You could encourage people to choose a random (supported) top-level part (.com, .fr, .se, .co.uk, etc) in links, so a single DNS takedown would only hit a portion of links (which could then still be hand-edited to a working link). Network resilience and peering would also be an issue. A country can always filter you out I guess, a la Great Firewall. The sync issues would be interesting. Not sure what the people using the hosting see (a db? a filesystem?). Do-able, tho. (Off the top of my head, I'd go for a DVCS-like model, where it's fully peer-to-peer, automerge when we can, punt to a human when we can't).