Is there a difference between being a pod provider and a web hosting provider? They appear to be the same thing.
Do pod providers fall under the same laws as a web hosting company?
I believe that a solid pod is just a website because ,it has a valid url as the homepage, and as a caveat, solid has its own Cpanel type site builder tools, Solid site builder tools called apps. So when will web hosting providers start to use it as such? And is anyone out there using NSS as a web hosting platform?
a web hosting provider provides either shared hosting which would be pure webspace or a root machine which means you have to administrate it yourself. in the case of a root machine you can install whatever you want, for example our NSS. solid server is a software that answers the GET, POST, PUT, PATCH etc. requests and serves as storage provider and ID management. linked data organizes different URIs in relations. so solid is in a way both, the server software and the databrowser that is running on that server.
I happen to have solid running on a root machine. the jurisdictial question is depending (beside other) on the country the machine or the physical storage is located in. see solid as a complicated way to serve a public homepage.
I am way beyond an expert, I still figure it out and do experiments on solidweb.org but in my eyes web hosting and pod provider is not equivalent. solid is the specification you need to serve the server like W3C does with HTML.
If a company sets up a solid pod (website) server, and call their selfs, solid pod providers, is that not the same as being a called a website hosting provider? as demonstrated here: https://www.101domain.com/web_id.htm This company is selling hosting under the web.id sub domain. Although we all know that this is the country code for Indonesia, some will probably attempt to ambiguously refer to it as Web.Identification domain and that may trick people into thinking that this web.id domain is for that purpose. I think this is dangerous.
Web hosting is the place that all of your website files live. So if your website files live in and are served up from a so called solid pod website server, the so called “solid pod provider” becomes your website (a/k/a solid pod) hosting provider. for the files stored therein.
If your solid pod (website) has a home page, and serves up other pages you create, and Solid is the platform for editing and storage (pod) of the pages on the website, then the semantics of what something is being called, and what it means are not two different things. It seems that there are new names given to old things all the time that causes confusion to users. No longer is a light bulb, a light bulb. A light bulb is now called an illuminator. They are not two separate things, they are one thing, using two separate words to describe it, one is what it is, the other is what they want to say it does. A jackal is a four legged creature, not all four legged creatures are jackals.
Is a website an application? to me an application is something like Microsoft Word, a/k/a a software program that is run on some hardware device somewhere or root machine. Indicating that websites are applications is nothing more than calling a lightbulb an illuminator. Using two different words to describe something, does not change what it, is. The meaning ascribed to a solid pod server, is the same as a website server, the website files are stored, editable, and served up via the server that is managed by the host of your site, or pod or what ever you decide to call it.
A WebID is a page created on a website that has the hallmarks of what the w3c indicates is a Identification document, but at it’s core, a WebID is simply a page on a website.
The Lunch Break App is not a thing! it is a website page created on the sub domain provided by the host, using Solid as the IDE, and solid as the storage, and using solid to serve up the page. So solid is the application used to create, edit and serve up the websites pages hosted on the sub domain provided by the owner of it.
The reason I bring this up is because, some will argue in future court battles that a solid pod provider is a web hosting provider.
Does anyone have a legal position on this subject?
I know nothing about how lawyers would make the call but a pod is expected to for one be a Linked Data Platform. Last I checked NSS reference impl was only doing Basic containers.
along with the the listed features
If any server out there implements enough of the solid spec it most likely can be considered a pod. Legally? Thats left to the minds of lawyers