★ ZKILLU

France has one of Europe's most concentrated retail telecom markets and, underneath it, one of the continent's liveliest populations of tiny, personal, semi-commercial network operators. ZKILLU — a game-server host from a village in the Loire, run by a president born in 1999, with a EUR 1,000 share capital and its own globally routed address space — is that stratum in miniature. This piece reconstructs, from registries, court notices and archived tariff pages, what it costs to be an operator this small, who supplies each layer, and who ultimately pays for France's volunteer internet.