Truly Stateless Companies by John Robb

Google has filed patents to create deep sea floating platforms to house its massive data centers. Not only would these "barges" be economical (lower cooling and energy costs), they would be outside tax and enforcement jurisdictions of all nation-states. If this effort is successful, it could result in an effort to rapidly construct offshore facilities (spread out for robustness and built by a multitude of companies). Interestingly, since the core of most multinationals is now software (people are replaceable and/or interchangeable via outsourcing), the shift to offshore locations would make companies nearly invulnerable to state coercion.