Scenario:
A bunch of friends want to co-locate servers in a datacenter. It's a lot cheaper to rent an entire rack at once vs. each person renting their own 1U or 2U of space. Some people will be running the servers for purely personal use, some will be running servers for business use.
So the friends have one of their number (call him M) deal with the datacenter. The rental contract is between the datacenter and M, and M adds everyone in the group to the list of people authorized to access the rack. M figures out how much each person has to pay each year (it can be different from person to person because people might have a different amount of space in the rack).
To make life easier on him, M asks people to pay half their annual charge twice a year. M then pays the datacenter charges on whatever schedule the contract between him and the datacenter calls for.
Questions:
1) Do/should those people who are running their servers for business use, and so can deduct the fee as a business expense, have to send a 1099-MISC to M?2) On the other side, how does M handle it? Is the whole thing just ignorable (it's not a business (is it?) -- he's just forwarding the money he receives)? If the business people have to 1099-MISC him, how does he deal with that?