Re: Protecting floating datahavens?

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 03:36 AM 8/16/96 -0700, William Knowles <erehwon@c2.org> wrote:
>Now this is a completely doable concept, and likely more realistic
>than the Oceania project, 

Oceania was perfectly doable, if you're cynical about its objectives :-)
It did great T-Shirts, got people to pay for newsletters, and even
got enough donations to get an architect to build a cool model
while keeping its head promoters in the Floating-Country-Promotion business.

One of the things that inspired people to believe in them is that there's
a floating hotel that used to hang out in the South Pacific, though it
may be in the Caribbean by now, which cost something like $20M for
a 200-room hotel.  The Oceania folks designed a billion-dollar
exravaganza that would be far more affordable per resident,
but it's a much bigger, and unrealistic, risk.   

The basic risks with such things are:
1) Getting governments to agree to leave you alone.  If you're doing a
        high-visibility call-yourself-a-country approach,
        and your country doesn't include Real Above-Sea-Level Dirt,
        you're really gambling on whether the UN and big countries
        will recognize you.  If you're just calling yourself a
        big houseboat, and don't upset the US Drug-Confiscation Pirates
        too much, you don't need to care as much about this one.
2) Getting governments and other pirates to actually leave you alone.
        The Republic of Minerva, back in the 70s, had real dirt
        (or at least coral reefs, and met the UN 1-foot-above-high-tide
        standards) near Fiji, but the Kingdom of Tonga invaded them
        after about six months.  Calling yourself a country
        is one way to attract adverse attention, but also has
        some protection.  Allowing people to use politically
        incorrect substances is another, and if you're allowing
        politically incorrect data, you're inviting governments
        to plant child-terrorist narco-pornography to justify
        "police actions" against you.
3) Making it work financially, for the proprietors and tenants/co-owners.
        Free-market enthusiasts generally assume this is doable,
        if the upfront/interest costs of the place aren't really prohibitive.
4) Convincing investors that you're safe enough on 1) and 2)
        that they're willing to risk the money to build/buy a
        country and hope it stays independent long enough to make a profit.
        With Oceania, it would have made much more sense to raise $25M,
        which is doable, to buy the floating hotel and declare independence.
        (Either one really rich guy, or a hundred yuppies of the 
        type that buy quarter-million-dollar condos in Maui will do.)
        Raising a billion dollars against that risk isn't.
        Raising a million for an oil rig, if they're that cheap,
        is also doable, though the politics for something
        anchored are different from a ship.
        
There's also a Laissez-Faire City project, which proposes to lease a
10-mile-square chunk of land to rent from any cooperative third-world
government for 50 years or so with a deal of local autonomy.
It's much less threatening to the Old World Order than calling yourself
a country, and you've got a government which is making money by
leaving you alone that at least discourages the most likely invaders
(itself, and the US) without having to provide much national defense.
Who knows, maybe they'll actually do something, and rent a chunk of
Costa Rica or Somaliland or whatever.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
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