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Comment by vineet | Hacker News Reader

Try getting the number from here: http://fedgov.dnb.com/webform/displayHomePage.do

You basically tell DnB that you are applying for a US government contract. They are then required to give give you the number within 1 day.

They will tell you that they will revoke your number if you don't enter yourself in some government database within 90 days. You can then enter yourself there (or as happened for us the first time we needed the number, we were just too busy to do that and figured that we would let it expire and deal with the consequences if anyone really needed to use the number).

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That seems dishonest. I don't think that's a good idea.

What if you then went out and found a random government contract to apply for?

Yeah, sorry, I have little tolerance for government created monopolies that are overly bureaucratic. We actually did have an SBIR for which we needed it.

D&B seems to be a good company, but the DUNS system seems broken and requires payment just to signup for no value being provided.

What makes you think D&B is a good company? As far as I can tell all their revenue streams sit right on the border of extortion. If they couldn't convince major players like apple or the US Gov to require the usage of a DUNs number, they wouldn't even have those revenue streams.

Additionally they are at this point the number 1 source of voicemail spam for me. And asking them to not call is non-functional.

D&B are definitely part of the axis of evil.

Along with the rest of the companies in that segment of the market.

DUNS aren't government created and they aren't a monopoly. The US government uses them, but companies like Apple certainly don't have to.

Is this your first exposure to the seamy underbelly of government contracting?

Better idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4980216

I almost consider that a positive in this case.

When you are dealing with a monopoly backed by government power the only dishonest thing to do is to not cheat them.

This is the method I used in the past when I needed a DUNS number for other reasons. However, recently trying this did not work at all. They simply email back saying "You're not a contractor for the US government" and then close the request.

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