Michaël | HouseStationLive.com5d ago

THE INCREDIBLE REASON HOUSE STATION LIVE CHANGED SERVERS
Or a survival guide for e-businesses facing bans or legal disputes with a platform

For nearly two years, we watched our entire platform become invisible. Not because of bad content, policy violations, or lack of effort... but because of a silent algorithmic shadowban. We had no warnings, no appeals, and no answers. Worse: under YouTube’s terms of service, any legal dispute must be handled in a U.S. court (even if you're based in France and pay taxes there). This is how global platforms sidestep national laws... and why creators are left legally unprotected in their own countries.
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PART ONE – WHEN A SHADOWBAN SHUTS DOWN YOUR BUSINESS
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Two years ago, we left Dedibox, a French hosting company we judged incapable of meeting even our most basic expectations in terms of customer service. In a field as critical as data hosting, the professionalism of the technical support team cannot be optional... it must be the company's showcase, the reassuring human face you turn to when something goes wrong. This pursuit of reliability led us to GoDaddy, based in Arizona, whose configuration tools, WordPress diagnostics, interface design, and especially their technically skilled support team had earned our trust... far beyond the empty promises of typical commercial discourse. But everything collapsed suddenly, swept away by a digital catastrophe we didn’t see coming. A brutal, invisible blow: the shadowban. House Station Live was ghosted (to use the terminology of our virtual assistant, GPT). Disappeared from search results, ignored by YouTube recommendations, erased from the Android Play Store. For eighteen months, despite heavy investments and extensive testing in formats, lengths, languages, thumbnails, titles, even hosts, nothing changed. Every video was locked between 20 and 30 views. We were trapped in that narrow range, with no human contact, no way to file a complaint, and no hope of improvement.

Facing this algorithmic wall, we made the only logical decision: open an investigation and build a legal case. Not to prove a “perfect crime” but to demonstrate that even the most opaque algorithms leave traces. During this inquiry, we came across a particularly disturbing fact: according to YouTube’s terms of use, any dispute must be brought before a U.S. judge. It doesn’t matter that you are based in France, targeting a French audience, or that French law requires foreign companies to have a legal presence in the country... Google circumvents this by distinguishing between headquarters, local offices, and legal jurisdiction. The result is clear: you are automatically excluded from the protection of your own legal system. This system is so airtight that very few individuals or businesses attempt legal action against Google. The GAFAM is protected by a lethal triad: algorithmic opacity, extraterritorial legal shielding, and the complicity of a U.S. government that views tech giants as national pride (even strategic weapons in the global information war). While France leaves its citizens exposed and helpless against digital abuse, the United States has conquered the Internet on a global scale by imposing its law as if it were sovereign territory.

To illustrate just how absurd and dangerous this has become, let’s take the example of music licensing. Every month, House Station Live pays royalties to SACEM, the French government’s music rights agency. In return, we are legally authorized to broadcast commercial works, provided we submit monthly playlists so that royalties can be fairly distributed to artists. In theory, everything is legal and in order. But the United States has its own system: the DMCA. And if you stream House Station Live through any platform based in the U.S. (like GoDaddy, YouTube, etc.), you are automatically subject to U.S. law, even if your legal entity is based in France. France, in turn, declares itself incompetent in such cases because the “crime scene” is legally located on American soil, where the servers are hosted. So the SACEM fee we pay offers zero protection, neither domestically nor abroad... where we’re treated like pirates. Imagine buying a product from a foreign website: you pay the foreign VAT, a currency conversion fee, and then the French customs tax. Three layers of taxation. A 30 € item ends up costing you 150 €. That’s digital over-taxation. And the same applies to our royalties.

Worse still, the U.S. considers you to be operating on their soil the moment your server is physically located there... regardless of where you are based, where your company is registered, or what contracts you’ve signed with your local rights agencies. Even if your SACEM contract is supposedly international, it offers you no protection in this skewed legal context. The U.S. has simply annexed the Internet, claimed it as their jurisdiction, and imposed their extraterritorial laws on the rest of the world (without any international mandate or global consent).
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||#HSLdiary #HSLpartners

#Shadowban #Censorship #YouTube #DMCA #DigitalRights #FrenchTech #AlgorithmBias #GoogleAbuse #PlatformAbuse #Justice

Show threadMichaël | HouseStationLive.com

THE INCREDIBLE REASON HOUSE STATION LIVE CHANGED SERVERS
Or a survival guide for e-businesses facing bans or legal disputes with a platform

When justice can’t be reached, relocation becomes resistance. Hosting your services on U.S. soil means giving up your legal rights. We rebuilt everything... servers, software, platforms... using European tools that respect our laws. From o2switch and Hetzner to Nobara and Tutanota, we chose freedom over convenience. Self-hosting isn't just about privacy or control anymore... it's about survival, sovereignty, and standing your ground against a system that was never designed to protect us.
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PART TWO – DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY STARTS WITH HOSTING
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In such a context, the very idea of a sustainable business model for a structure like ours becomes laughable. One single ban, and it all collapses. No access. No visibility. No way to defend your rights. No representative. No lawyer. No legal process. The one exception? Uber. Because French courts ruled that the roads used by drivers are physically located in France, and therefore subject to French law. So what about YouTube? Isn’t it made of “tubes” too... literal, physical tubes... like undersea cables and fiber optics stretching across the Atlantic? I don’t want to sound cynical, but at some point, those tubes pass through France too. And still, that’s not enough. Our content, disputes, and takedowns are judged under laws written an ocean away.

And this is where the trap closes. Whether or not the platforms promote freedom and open source (Mastodon, Odysee, BitChute, Ghost.io, Vimeo, Twitch, YouTube), all of them without exception state in their terms of service that disputes must be resolved in foreign jurisdictions. It doesn’t matter that they advocate for user privacy or net neutrality. Their U.S. legal base is enough to activate the DMCA... a law that assumes you’re guilty before you’ve even had the chance to defend yourself. The result is inevitable: there is only one viable solution for those who wish to preserve their rights and survive this digital chaos... Work exclusively with providers based in France or Europe. That’s the only way to remain under a legal framework we understand, recognize, and can actually enforce.

What might seem like a paranoid fantasy is now our operational doctrine. We spent weeks looking for a sustainable solution. GoDaddy has now been replaced by a two-part setup: OVH for domain names, and o2switch for hosting. Why? Because despite OVH’s weak customer service, their DNS is reliable. And o2switch is a rare gem... a French company, bound by French law, with real human support, and no interest in exploiting your data. Their model is simple, fair, and unlimited. While competitors charge for every byte as if it were gold, o2switch provides powerful tools, solid infrastructure, and a win-win philosophy. Even better: their WordPress support is widely praised by the community. Thanks to this change, we can now host our own videos previously uploaded to YouTube, using WordPress plugins with secure players. The so-called alternatives to YouTube, even those advocating for openness, are all U.S.-based. o2switch is a rare find... a real asset for digital sovereignty, allowing us to continue existing without sacrificing our values or sinking deeper into debt.

Twitch has been replaced by Owncast, hosted on Hetzner Cloud (Germany) for just €3.79/month, with simple installation. Private streaming isn’t supported, but public indexing through their directory could even boost our reach. Captivate is replaced by Podlove, a WordPress plugin, which lets us centralize content and simplify navigation. ChatGPT is replaced by Le Chat Mistral, the only AI neither American nor Asian. Windows is phased out in favor of Nobara Linux, backed by a strong open-source community and compatible with nearly all modern games. Kdenlive replaces paid video editing software. Logitech peripherals are supported. Elgato is out... replaced by Loupedeck, a better fit for Linux with hardware-level controls. Emails remain with Tutanota, an EU-based provider committed to privacy. A few exceptions remain... Hear-me.social (a Mastodon instance) and RadioBoss Cloud... based in Eastern Europe. Social media now plays only a teaser role. The real content, the heart of the experience, lives with us... on our own infrastructure, in our own digital home.

Why does this all matter? Because if your website is hosted on servers physically located in France, your opponents must use French law to come after you. No more DMCA. No more California courtrooms. If a U.S. company wants to take down your content or claim ownership, they’ll have to go through French courts, under French law, with all the procedural safeguards that entails. In short, this technical migration is a legal survival strategy. A way to reclaim our infrastructure, our freedom of speech, and our digital future. As long as your platform is hosted in the U.S., you are at their mercy. But by bringing our data home to France, we regain our sovereignty.
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||#HSLdiary #HSLpartners

#SelfHosting #DigitalSovereignty #FreeSoftware #FediTech #France #EUtech #o2switch #Hetzner #Nobara #Tutanota

May 28 at 11:45pmWeb