US Government: You're Scaring Web Businesses Into Moving Out Of The US
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
By the way, Techdirt's Mike is such a great guy. He has been very supportive and he even introduced us to some lawyers.
Anyhow, I totally agree that the gov't is out of control. It isn't just with this copyright stuff either.
I sell electronic cigarettes and have an innovation to improve adoption with smokers. My product will undoubtedly be proven many times safer than smoking and more effective in helping people quit, but we face seizures and the threat of regulations which will shutter small businesses like mine.
I'm doing #4, "Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country." as soon as I can afford to.
Financially support an organisation that will defend your rights. It's like paying a retainer to a lawyer. You might not need them, but they will probably help fight for what's important to your business.
I just found a way to better serve consumers what they wanted.. pretty standard entrepreneurial story. If everyone let the 90%+ fail rate of businesses scare them from trying, the world would seriously suck.
Part of what I need to do to succeed is recognizing the threat of legislation and finding a better place to do business. My point was that the ridiculousness of SOPA and such isn't new and hurts other parts of the economy too. (and I am genuinely curious what #0 means)
That makes you even more dangerous than if you sold regular cigarettes, because e-cigs have the potential to change the game - to change their entire industry. And big companies hate it when the industry has to radically change from a model that worked for decades.
I'm thinking of sites like that forms site that suddenly got taken down wrecking the day of, what, millions of customers? How many of them might changed to an identical site that guarantees no US gov interference? Such people might not even realise its not the same people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...
This is why it's so important citizens are aware of what goes on in Washington, and move to stop a bill if it's too dangerous. Because if it does pass, it will probably be a decade or more before people even start thinking about repealing a bad law. What's worse is by then, a few more bills will pass to enforce that one.
I wonder what'll happen when/if the US shuts down some non-US business's .com, and that business starts getting court orders to force local ISPs to resolve that. It would either lead to a split in the .com namespace, or international diplomatic agreements on DNS (like how there is international maritime law about what happens in international waters). This would make the USA no longer have control over it.
1) You want to select a jurisdiction that has clean, flexible, and stable set of corporate laws that have already been through judicial review. This provides a robust foundation for corporate structure with few legal unknowns or political risks.
2) Important for investors, the corporate laws must be fair to all parties involved. For example, a jurisdiction with corporate laws that allow a minority shareholder or employee to screw the majority shareholders or hold the company hostage is bad and greatly increases investor risk. There are many jurisdictions that are like this, even in the US. It is one of the reasons you never see tech companies incorporated in California, for example, even though Silicon Valley is there.
3) A jurisdiction that operates under English Common Law is convenient because it is the common basis of contract law used in business, particularly if it involves parties in multiple jurisdictions. Delaware is a nice example of such a jurisdiction with a long, sane, and mature judicial history.
Jurisdictions like Delaware are among the very best in the world for everyone involved if you are building an investor-backed business. Startups that are not incorporated there often have to reincorporate in a place like Delaware as a condition of investment. It is all about having a stable, scalable, and fair set of legal rules on which to build the company.
The average startup faces much more risk from being in a poor jurisdiction than whatever risk you perceive from being incorporated in the US. Investors know this and proper jurisdiction selection is an inexpensive way of reducing the total risk to startup success.
Regardless, I think that, ultimately, when it comes to DotCOM, it does not matter which registrar you use, or where your business is located, because it seems as if the US will continue with, and expand upon, its various efforts at interfering with that TLD. I have a pressing need to register a bunch of domains, and it's obvious that I should use DotCOM (simply for the purpose of preventing those names from being taken by someone else in the most popular TLD), but I don't know to which TLD(s) my DotCOMs should point. I've investigated a bunch of them, and I'm leaning towards DotTEL, because it has a few nice features, particularly its uniqueness in that every webpage is generated dynamically from content stored in DNS. Of course, DotTEL can't replace most websites, but it could act as a gateway to your content.
What non-US alternatives there exist e.g. for Amazon?
Not in the same league with Amazon, but still interesting:
Using 100% renewable energy (not just co2-neutralized), located in Iceland (they have sane IP laws AFAIK), and claiming to be "AWS EC2 and S3 drop-in replacement".
AWS is still a US company, but they offer services from non-US DCs.
That's the very problem (i.e. US legislation), not the physical locations of DCs.
If the founders are unable to identify using GoDaddy as an unacceptable risk and are unable to quickly find an alternative, then one might justifiably come to the conclusion that said founders don't know what they're doing.
If an investor is unable to recognize the risk, then one might justifiably come to the conclusion that they don't know what they're doing, and should stick to Real Estate Development and Direct Mail advertising.
Personally, I like gandi.net for domain registration and hosting. They're not the cheapest, but they're not in the US.
This is what, the third one or something in about a week?