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Has HavenCo's Data Haven Shut Down?
secmartin writes "HavenCo, the self-proclaimed data haven located on the micronation Sealand, appears to be offline. Their website is down, and there have been no announcements from either HavenCo or Sealand. HavenCo has been covered here before; it was mostly known for offering hosting of content that might be illegal in other countries. Does anyone have news about what happened to them?"
This presentation outlined a brief history of the deal between HavenCo and Sealand.
HavenCo has to pay Sealand considerable amount to keep the business running there. Therefore, the recently financial crisis would hit HavenCo badly.
Well, by that argument, most of the countries in the Middle East and Africa haven't got a snowflake's chance in hell of fighting off either the US, Russia or China. By that yard stick, they aren't sovereign either.
One of the reasons we aren't mired in huge amounts of empire building these days is because the major powers are largely bound by international law (which is still young and a little 'edgy'). Sealand makes interesting use of those laws in maintaining its independence (and hey, lots of places are now no longer truly independent, just look at the effects of this global credit crisis to see how far and how deep international trade runs).
Should the UK get sufficiently peeved, it will still need sufficient legal backing to annex Sealand (otherwise, it could quite happily decide that it'll expand its borders into, say, France).
There is already a lot of jostling and arguing over National boundaries, and has been for some time; it's just all handled in the courts (well, apart from the jostling in the fishermen's boats). Sealand is just using exactly the same laws.
I suspect the legal wrangling would be that Sealand was never truly a sovereign nation anyhow, making the whole of the later legal premises void. But that in itself would be an interesting courtroom wrangle.
You can of course say "What the hell" and just shut it down. But that would be against the law.. And the UK has big enough issues at the moment without getting hauled through the international courts.
By that standard, parts of the UK are in Sealand's jurisdiction.
Julie Moult is an idiot.