Silicon Valley billionaire funding creation of artificial libertarian islands

[Dale_M]

Don’t worry if it looks tiny! Apparently, there are a few rooms in the two concrete pylons as well! lol

The guided tour was kind of fun, even if pretty much what I expected. If anyone wants to skip straight to it, it begins around the 8:00 mark in part II of Youtube video which Rolltide linked.

The one surprise was the business center, which they couldn’t discuss due to secrecy. It turns out that HavenCo was sort of an anything goes server farm, hosting content which couldn’t be hosted in regular nations. The only rule was no child pr0n.

However, the business apparently was teetering by 2003, finally going bust in 2008, This has been documented in a number of news outlets, but a lengthy article at The Volokh Conspiracy offers a good explanation of why it met its demise, and why it was probably doomed from the beginning.

On one level, HavenCo suffered a classic early-2000s dot-com flameout: it was overhyped and underused. The company never had more than a dozen clients at a time; most of them were online gambling sites. There never were nitrogen-filled server rooms or .50-caliber machine guns. Doing everything from Sealand drove up the costs; the expected flood of business never materialized. Sean and Jo Hastings, tired of living at sea, dropped out of the project.

There had also been a deep rift between HavenCo and its hosts. Lackey was a strong believer in freedom through cryptography: he did things like install an anonymous remailer. Prince Michael and his advisors, though, had much less appetite for real conflict with the major nations of the world. They regularly put the kibosh on any of Lackey’s plans that he told them about, like his scheme for a “10kg gold backed online electronic currency at HavenCo using anonymous digital cash technology.” The straw that broke the camel’s back for him was Sealand’s unwillingness to get into the unauthorized streaming-video business.

HavenCo at this point theoretically owed Sealand princely sums under its original contract, and also owed Lackey for the debt he’d taken on to keep it going. He and the Sealanders worked out a deal in which Sealand would take over day-to-day operations, with Lackey staying involved as an authorized reseller (but from dry land). Within days, though, he alleged at Defcon, Sealand froze him out: changing the passwords and seizing his personal computers. HavenCo, he said, had been “effectively nationalized.”

volokh.com/2011/02/15/sealand-and-havenco-part-ii-the-rise-and-fall-of-havenco/

The entire five part article can be read here:
volokh.com/author/jamesgrimmelmann/

Probably worth mentioning is the inherent danger in this type of “we are our own nation” scheme… violence. The Bates family acquired the Sealand platform by attacking and expelling the previous tenants. And then, years later, they too were attacked and occupied. As someone noted earlier in this discussion, a venture such as Sealand will owe its existence to not being valuable to others.