Prince Roy (and his wife Joan) are really great people -- the best of the British in WW2, in addition to all the interesting Sealand stuff later. (I probably met them ~5 times -- we (me, Sean Hastings, Jo Hastings, maybe Sameer Parekh?) had tea with them in 1999 and then went forward with the Sealand/HavenCo thing.
It didn't really amount to anything in the end (written about a lot online...), but was an interesting experience.
I have a lot more faith in either technological solutions (cryptography, cloud computing, threshold cryptosystems, tamper resistant devices, etc.) and in jurisdictional arbitrage of "normal" countries than in any of the "new countries" or even borderline countries (Somalia, Kosovo, South Sudan, etc.), though, for being great places to host stuff. Still seems more likely to succeed than political change in places like the US and EU, though.
> In 1966, a former pirate radio broadcaster, Major Paddy Roy Bates, occupied a disused military platform in the North Sea, and moved his family aboard. The next year he declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand, appointing himself Prince Roy, and his wife, a former fashion model, as Princess Joan. Five decades on, the Bates family still occupy the platform, having survived the repeated attempts by the British government to evict them by legal means, and having fought off attempts by rival groups to seize the platform by force. It's a story of coups, counter-coups, guns, petrol bombs, and rival groups of foreign businessmen. Jolyon Jenkins interviews surviving witnesses to tell the story of this real life "Passport to Pimlico".
Probably the best way to use a marginal state for datacenter stuff for "difficult" content (Liberia, Somalia, etc.) would be to put a relocatable or write-offable datacenter there (containerized stuff which could be fully depreciated in 6mo, which is about as long as you might trust their government...), or maybe a ship in offshore waters.
A lot easier today than back in 1999. Even places like Somalia (+Somaliland, Puntland) have decent bandwidth for cellphone IP backhaul, so you could put a rack or two of equipment in a van nearly anywhere, and either buy bandwidth locally or get 10-100Mbps of satellite bandwidth (expensive and slow, true), But, there really isn't much point.
First problem is that without support of the local Sovereign (Be it state or local warlord) in this class of states you will be robbed sooner or later.
The other problem of marginal states is that they will catch you and present you as a token of good will to "The Empire", as soon as "The Empire" only mentions about "investing" around 10$ MM.
I really don't understand why (some) shady people feel safe in banana republics. Its a fact that as soon as Eye of Sauron turns towards you, you will be betrayed and given over. Plus you have to endure many other hardships.
The other way is that you serve eg. Russia vs USA or any other permutation of world powers, where one power keeps you in its area of influence and keeps signaling to your adversaries that you are off limits. This enables you to operate from where ever. Or if you become a possible diplomatic problem, your sponsor will tell you where to go.
It's now at the point where you can stand up a datacenter for $100-200k and provide the same cloud API to there as to anywhere else. You can then write off that infrastructure entirely if you get raided. Obviously you don't stick around, you have it set up by contractors who may or may not know you, etc.
As long as your content in a given country is only slightly annoying to the US (which is really the only global power that matters; within regions, there are other countries which are important regional powers though), it won't warrant a $10-100mm effort to shut it down. The US isn't going to invade Somalia for Adobe or Universal, and the Somaliland government doesn't care much for the Transitional Government down in Mogadishu. Paying $100k/yr in local "taxes" would make you the most fifth most profitable industry in the country (after remittances, international aid (small to Somaliland, mainly from Islamic or Diaspora charities), the ~4 cell providers, the airport).
It's different for different kinds of content. The US has always been pretty friendly to most porn, at least in 9th circuit land and especially California. (obviously there's 2257 requirements in excess of just "no child porn", and some other more extreme content is questionable, as Max Little found out...), although the real risk there is particular state/local jurisdictions, not federal. The US is also an excellent place for religious materials, (neo-)nazi stuff, and anything which falls under the general realm of political or religious speech. Also, horrible for gambling ("gaming").
The US is generally a bad place for commercially infringing content, though.
For something like Megaupload, I'd probably go with HK, China, and Russia. Some European countries have been good for certain kinds of things in the past.
Dodgy porn, NL or Denmark or Eastern Europe tend to be the best. (even "porn which would be otherwise legal but doesn't have 2257 documentation").
Spam and spam-related things seem to be "non iso-latin1 lands", like China and Russia.
Gambling, getting a license and going through Costa Rica or British Crown areas seems to be what most people do, although this is fairly specific to the licensee, and I haven't kept up with it. There was an interesting loophole with the Mohawk nation up in Canada for a while, not sure how that is doing now. The big crackdown seems to be on payment processing for gaming, now.
It didn't really amount to anything in the end (written about a lot online...), but was an interesting experience.
I have a lot more faith in either technological solutions (cryptography, cloud computing, threshold cryptosystems, tamper resistant devices, etc.) and in jurisdictional arbitrage of "normal" countries than in any of the "new countries" or even borderline countries (Somalia, Kosovo, South Sudan, etc.), though, for being great places to host stuff. Still seems more likely to succeed than political change in places like the US and EU, though.