Originally Posted by PR_Tom

It's all about who is responsible for maintaining the site as I recall. Not who owns the domain, not where the physical server is, but the person who maintains the site.

I could sit here in the US with a host in china and a domain owner in russia and if I'm the one ftp'ing files, it's my ass.

That was my rudimentary understanding of the whole deal. Been a long time since reading it though.