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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

I had the same kind of thought, but I think the 'invention' is really figuring out an application of ip geolocation, and a market for that application.

IMHO, it wasn't hard to figure out roughly where servers or peers were in the real world based on their IP address and network routes to them, but it was non obvious why someone would want to pay for a service...

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If you read the patent it's clear it's not even that. He filed a patent for an idea, where you would build a database based on geo information provided by the user.

And even before the existence of data privacy laws, this simply would not have worked.

Instead companies like Maxmind implemented the much better idea of sourcing location data from Whois databases and ISPs server-side.

That's what everybody understands when you use the term "IP Geolocation".

"I worked out how to monetize it"

is very different to

"I invented it"

To clarify, yes whois registries have existed since the start of the Internet. However the location provided by those registries does not equate to the users' location. For example, back in the day, IBM (IIRC) ran a worldwide network of dial-ins and all of their IPs were registered back to their headquarters in Schenectady, NY. So yes, we figured out how to monetize it and maybe in the extreme "invented" is a stretch - maybe I should have said "invented a way for it to be accurate to a city level". In case you're wondering, 94% accurate to a city level, worldwide when I was there.

I think this is a much better tagline, personally. It paints a picture of how it went above and beyond what was there already.

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