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Comment by ai-christianson | Hacker News Reader

The second instruction says to rent a VPS. How are you a landlord if you're renting a server?

How are you a landlord if you're paying property taxes?

Once you have everything else set up, you can migrate to a server hosted on your own internet connection. Running your own data center is one of the more tricky parts of the equation, compared to almost-free web hosting for a 10MB site.

You're also just renting a domain name.

The government graciously allows you to sublet their property as long as you keep up with the annual protection racket payments

The violence is inherent in the system.

It’s not a racket — the state does use its monopoly on violence to enforce your title to the land. Otherwise it would only be yours until someone bigger and stronger came by.

And the mob really does honor their protection racket, too. If some punk comes and tries messing with a store protected by the mob, the mob deals with the problem.

Yet nobody goes around looking to purchase protection from the mob either, do they? The key problem with the arrangement isn't that the protection isn't provisioned, it's that the entire arrangement is involuntary and forced upon the business owner through threat of violence, whether by the mob or the state.

I guess it's renting all the way down unless it's something like a decentralized network where control of keys represent ownership.

And even with a decentralized mesh network you rely on good behavior from your peer/local nodes. Turns out the only way to truly own land is when your network consists of 10.0.0.0/8.

You’re also only renting your internet connection!

If you want to be a real rent-seeker (sorry, meant to say “landlord”) you’ll need to purchase an AS and become a BGP-peering sovereign citizen cutting deals with backbone networks.

> ... you’ll need to purchase an AS and become a BGP-peering sovereign citizen cutting deals with backbone networks

Which is doable as an individual. One of my very best mate did just that: granted he's got quite the networking skills but he did that entirely on his own.

He'll even get 256 IPv4 addresses but for these he was put on a long waiting list (I think in one to two months he'll get them but he's waiting since about a year): IPv4 addresses are the actual scarce landlordy Internet resources!

Your buddy probably still has to pay for internet exchange with the backbones, they only give it for free if you're also a tier 1 ISP (i.e. see Lumen's requirements[1] and the others'[2]). Even massive ISPs like Comcast still have to pay for internet access[3] because they're not big enough to be a "peer" to the tier 1s.

PS. I think you're shadowbanned since this and your last 7 comments all showed up as [dead].

[1]: https://www.lumen.com/en-us/about/legal/peering-policy.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#List_of_Tier_1_...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#Other_major_net...

> How are you a landlord if you're paying property taxes?

Asking the important questions.

Easy question. You're only a Lord, not a King, so you pay fealty.

Getting your own backbone cable installed in the ocean is where the real expenses begin though.

this is why i love Tor. you can simply host a site from any pc without certificate, domain, proxy, vps.

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