That’s not true if you and your employees are on earth. It’s like saying, “I’m building data centers in neutral waters, and no one can manage me.” Nope. It doesn’t work that way. You’re subject to the jurisdiction of the country whose flag your ship flies
You’re absolutely right that maritime law works this way—but actual shipping companies manage to get around it all the time.
1) Poorer nations compete with one another to have the absolute most permissive maritime regulations they possibly can so as to attract shipping companies registering with them as a flag state. (The money from such registry ain’t great but it makes a significant difference to certain economies).
2) The shipping companies register ships under one flag state then, if they’re ever forced to submit to regulations or go to court or anything they simply re-flag the vessel and say “Sorry, we’re Panamanian now, not Nigerian, we’re out of your jurisdiction”. Within a few years the same vessel will fall afoul of Panama’s authorities and be re-flagged as Liberian, then Bermudan, and so on.
3) When you’re deep sea, you can do all sorts of illegal stuff—under both international law and the laws of even the most permissive flag states—including gross environmental damage, forced labour, human and animal rights abuses, and nobody will ever know. This stuff happens all the time (source: spent half my life at sea). There’s very little money, political will, public demand, and practical ability to police the behaviour of vessels on the other side of the planet, the best part of a thousand miles from the nearest inhabited land and ten thousand miles from your country’s nearest government asset.
The EU is experimenting with detecting certain kinds of common deep-sea environmental crimes by satellite remote sensing—but A) this has the same jurisdictional problems as everything else and you can be sure the rest of the world won’t ever spend money on it, and B) it’s only effective for detecting one type of crime, and even then only when the resulting pollution is big enough to be seen from space. The Bermudan government developing the capability to remotely detect illegal activity inside a USA-headquartered (but Bermuda-flagged) megacorp’s satellite seems even more unlikely.
I really hope you’re right and that flag-state controls can be relied-upon to prevent illegal activity in space—but I’m afraid maritime law (and the behaviour of entirely terrestrial corporations..) doesn’t offer a very promising case-study.
The Bermudan government developing the capability to remotely detect illegal activity inside a USA-headquartered (but Bermuda-flagged) megacorp’s satellite seems even more unlikely.
… but that only applies if the illegal activity stays inside the satellite. Presumably your data center is interesting because it communicates with something on Earth. People can say, “Hey, Bermuda, we’re getting spam from your satellite, clean it up.”. Or cut off the downlink. Not to say that the international thing wouldn’t be a giant impediment to enforcement, but I don’t think it’s the same as somebody dumping fuel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
That’s not true if you and your employees are on earth. It’s like saying, “I’m building data centers in neutral waters, and no one can manage me.” Nope. It doesn’t work that way. You’re subject to the jurisdiction of the country whose flag your ship flies
You’re absolutely right that maritime law works this way—but actual shipping companies manage to get around it all the time.
1) Poorer nations compete with one another to have the absolute most permissive maritime regulations they possibly can so as to attract shipping companies registering with them as a flag state. (The money from such registry ain’t great but it makes a significant difference to certain economies).
2) The shipping companies register ships under one flag state then, if they’re ever forced to submit to regulations or go to court or anything they simply re-flag the vessel and say “Sorry, we’re Panamanian now, not Nigerian, we’re out of your jurisdiction”. Within a few years the same vessel will fall afoul of Panama’s authorities and be re-flagged as Liberian, then Bermudan, and so on.
3) When you’re deep sea, you can do all sorts of illegal stuff—under both international law and the laws of even the most permissive flag states—including gross environmental damage, forced labour, human and animal rights abuses, and nobody will ever know. This stuff happens all the time (source: spent half my life at sea). There’s very little money, political will, public demand, and practical ability to police the behaviour of vessels on the other side of the planet, the best part of a thousand miles from the nearest inhabited land and ten thousand miles from your country’s nearest government asset.
The EU is experimenting with detecting certain kinds of common deep-sea environmental crimes by satellite remote sensing—but A) this has the same jurisdictional problems as everything else and you can be sure the rest of the world won’t ever spend money on it, and B) it’s only effective for detecting one type of crime, and even then only when the resulting pollution is big enough to be seen from space. The Bermudan government developing the capability to remotely detect illegal activity inside a USA-headquartered (but Bermuda-flagged) megacorp’s satellite seems even more unlikely.
4) You don’t even need to go to sea (or into space) for this sort of thing. Note for example that Meta’s digital sweatshops and workforce-wide human rights abuses are located in Kenya and Ghana rather than San Francisco.
I really hope you’re right and that flag-state controls can be relied-upon to prevent illegal activity in space—but I’m afraid maritime law (and the behaviour of entirely terrestrial corporations..) doesn’t offer a very promising case-study.
… but that only applies if the illegal activity stays inside the satellite. Presumably your data center is interesting because it communicates with something on Earth. People can say, “Hey, Bermuda, we’re getting spam from your satellite, clean it up.”. Or cut off the downlink. Not to say that the international thing wouldn’t be a giant impediment to enforcement, but I don’t think it’s the same as somebody dumping fuel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.