Hi, I'm From the Government and I'm Here to Help | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm From the Government and I'm Here to Help

allthingsd.com

32 pointsrpsubhub45 comments

The award for least sympathetic story of government mishandling of startups goes to this guy, who was prevented from hijacking NX records at the root name servers by the commerce department, and then prevented from obtaining a timely patent for same from the patent department.

This is the rare case where a mistaken midnight raid by a militarized ATF team might actually be cause for jubilation.

Exactly this. I read the article incredulous about how close we came to this guy fucking up DNS for eveyone.

I also found it funny that he felt the problem of patents taking so long could easily be solved by hiring more examiners. Because, after all, that must be a job that requires little education, skills, or training and should be able to be done by anyone, right?

Is it not true that the problem of waiting years for one's patent to be examined could be solved by hiring more patent examiners?

Not if additional examiners don't work in parallel, but sequentially, adding more layers to the process.

>Is it not true that the problem of waiting years for one's patent to be examined could be solved by hiring more patent examiners?

The problem with this part of the patent system is that there are too many software patents filed. Moreover, the amount you get paid as a patent examiner is a small fraction of what you get with the equivalent computer science or engineering education in private industry.

In order to fix the problem (other than by using the proper solution of eliminating software patents), they would have to do three things simultaneously: Give each examiner substantially more time to do the work of searching for prior art and fighting with the applicant's lawyers, hire significantly more examiners, and pay each examiner substantially more so as to be wage competitive with private industry and attract sufficiently high-quality examiners.

Doing any without the others just expands the scope of the problem. If you hire more examiners but still don't give them enough time to vet patent applications or still don't pay them well enough to attract the sort of people who can match wits with patent applicants' teams of lawyers, all you get is bad patents faster. And, naturally, if you can get patents faster (bad or otherwise) then you increase the incentive to file patent applications (bad or otherwise), which puts more load on the patent examiners. Which they won't want to (or be allowed to) hire more of again since they just did, and they'll continue to be under pressure to shorten the time to patent issuance given those they just hired, so the pressure on each examiner to examine patents quickly instead of thoroughly increases, it becomes even easier (rather than just faster) to get bad patents, and the number of bad patent applications increases again.

And, of course, doing all three of the things that would be necessary to fix that would be extraordinarily expensive, because they multiply together: You have to hire more, higher paid examiners to each examine fewer patents.

Or we could just eliminate software patents. That would sort it.

Or we could just eliminate software patents. That would sort it.

I tend to agree with this, but: what if we had some other rules in place, not just for software patents, but all patents? Like for instance, anyone who files a patent must also file documentation that they have searched for prior art and either not found any, or have documentation as to why their patent is different enough. If the patent examiner finds prior art that the filer didn't disclose, automatic denial of patent and the filer's privilege to file is revoked for a limited period of time. That and outlawing non-practicing entities from holding patents would probably go a long way to fixing the situation, and might even have a chance of happening.

>If the patent examiner finds prior art that the filer didn't disclose, automatic denial of patent and the filer's privilege to file is revoked for a limited period of time.

Revoking the ability to file is no real deterrent because they'll just file the next one under a different shell corporation. And you're falling into the "small inventor trap": "The little guy can't afford such a comprehensive search so you're excluding him from the patent system." (Never mind that the patent office is expected to do such a search for the amount of the filing fee.) That's the argument you'll get.

>That and outlawing non-practicing entities from holding patents would probably go a long way to fixing the situation, and might even have a chance of happening.

You have a much better chance of abolishing software patents than preventing trolls from holding patents in all industries -- the trolls are the main lobby for keeping software patents. The balance of major software companies is, if anything, probably somewhat against software patentability.

I would argue that even if it was true, it isn't an easy and practical solution, given the fear of budget deficits and spending that has infected Congress - hiring more federal employees isn't always the easiest sell.

So for the article to suggest that there is such a simple solution to this problem that the government is too stupid to overlook seems quite incorrect.

Also it bears noting that the Department of Commerce has somewhat more responsibility for the DNS system than simply regulating it...

I can't decide if this is honest or a fantastic troll. At each point where the government "stepped in", it acted in a way that likely provides any technical reader with relief.

I had assumed that when "[the government] did play a role and, for the most part, it was not a good one", it would be in the form of business or labor regulation. Instead, this company laments that setting up their private revenue mechanism in the middle of public infrastructure was met with government regulation? And their inability to gain patent protection on an idea that is obvious but not previously implemented only works in this world that seems to assume that truly anything is patentable. The government acted in both situations to protect the common good from the selfish desires of a business.

For my own sanity and faith in humanity, I will assume that this is a fantastic troll. To assume otherwise requires me to fear entrepreneurial "innovation".

My personal guess is that it's an honest article from an utter scumbag. Imagine if you were reading this as someone who isn't a geek and isn't already familiar with what he was trying to do - it'd be an entirely different experience.

For instance, there was actually a fair amount of geek-subculture support for Lightsquared's even more awful attempt to make a quick buck whilst breaking GPS in the process, because their promises were geek-friendly and most geeks didn't have right the technical knowlege to understand what was wrong with their business model. That was also stopped by Government intervention and they tried to spin it as the Government driving an innovative new startup out of business to protect incumbents, with some success.

> Lightsquared's even more awful attempt to make a quick buck whilst breaking GPS in the process

I think I missed this, do you have a link?

They had the smart idea of buying up cheap wireless spectrum right next to GPS that's only licensed for low-power satellite transmissions and using it to run a high-powered terrestrial 4G network, hence the geek appeal. It didn't work for fairly inevitable technical reasons: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/why-lightsquared-... (If anything that article's more sympathetic to Lightsquared than they deserve - it's not clear it's even physically possible to build GPS receivers that wouldn't be affected.)

Spoofing DNS results so you can deliver advertisements? Thank god they are gone, and spare me the "government" stuff. Thats all I need to know.

Heres what the ICANN says:

• ICANN strongly discourages the use of DNS redirection, wildcards, synthesized responses and any other form of NXDOMAIN substitution in new and existing gTLDs and ccTLDs and any other level in the DNS tree for registry-class domain names. [1]

[1]: http://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/nxdomain-substi...

ICANN is awful for so many things... but on this, they are absolutely correct.

NXDOMAIN isn't just an error message, it's a piece of information that can be absolutely essential to debugging.

This idea is absolutely not innovative. A couple of years back VeriSign tried this crap on *.com and got called out, loudly, harshly and correctly, for messing with basic infrastructure.

The idea that replacing sensible error messages by worthless ad-portals is somehow innovative is ridiculous, and granting a patent for it would be even more so.

I am very happy that this company died. This is one technology that is not "innovative and disruptive", but merely disruptive, namely, disrupting the basic working of the Internet. It is a pity that taxpayer money was spent on it.

Edit: It was VeriSign not Verizon.

I was under the impression that this was the contractor that put together VeriSign Site Finder. Where else has this sort of thing happened?

Could be, but I couldn't find any information linking them to Site Finder.

At present they seem to be running this on the ISP level, but the article claims they have previously done this "deeper" in the network. I don't know any details, unfortunately.

VirginMedia in the UK has it enabled. You have to opt out

"We learned that government officials are often wary of, if not downright hostile to, the kind of disruption that is an all-but-inevitable consequence of innovation."

"The original idea was straightforward: Replace “error” pages, which are generated when you type a mistake in your web browser... with search results that contained paid advertising."

Cognitive, meet dissonance.

This is why the concepts of startups typically rubs me the wrong way. You get a guy with some technical expertise and a plan to make money. It's not that good of an idea, and it has many negative effects on people that will never know who he or his company is. Then when he experiences the reasonable backlash for his idea, he blames everyone and everything except himself and his stupid idea. Yeah, it's the government's fault that they're not going to let you siphon money out of a public resource.

What's next, the government preventing me from damming the Hudson River and charging boats $1000 to go through my locks? Why must the government stand in the way of me getting money by screwing the rest of society over? Why must they only support businesses that add value to society? The system is rigged and everyone is out to get me.

Uh huh. The government is the bad guy...

"Government is broken even though I got the got the government to invest in my startup on really favorable terms, because I got predictably shut down by the regulator of my industry who wasn't comfortable with my spammy product, and I couldn't convince the government to let me patent my spammy idea. Why can't I just get everything to go my way?"

This start-up brought little to no value to anyone and is complaining their business model failed because of legislation. Mind-boggling.

"rules make it a snap, and potentially quite lucrative, for people to file civil lawsuits"

"One suit against us, a proposed class action, came from an elderly woman in New York City"

Seems like I'm in the minority on this, but I'm always amazed by the rage some people have for other people using the courts to redress wrongs. Call me naive, but the U.S. justice system is for all Americans, not just for the rich and powerful.

And his proposed remedy, to make the loser of a suit pay all the costs, would make it effectively impossible for an individual to ever sue a large corporation.

>Seems like I'm in the minority on this, but I'm always amazed by the rage some people have for other people using the courts to redress wrongs. Call me naive, but the U.S. justice system is for all Americans, not just for the rich and powerful.

The trouble is that the court system has ceased to be a forum in which it is cost-effective to obtain justice for ordinary people. If you're a small business, anyone can file a lawsuit against you for millions of dollars using lawyers working for "free" on contingency that they get a large chunk of the judgment if they win, and the cost of defending against that lawsuit in court even if it's totally without merit is enough to bankrupt the large majority of small businesses. Which converts the primary consequence of filing a lawsuit from "redress grievances" to "impose large unrecoverable costs on ultimately victorious defendants" and makes unjust settlement of specious claims the norm since it costs less than fighting them.

That said, the jackass in this particular instance got only a part of what was coming to him and no one should have any sympathy for him.

I'm very happy that things turned out for him the way they did. I'm glad that there was push-back to the way they replaced http error codes with "search results and paid advertising". I'm glad that USPO didn't grant them, what sounds like, a ridiculous patent. It was a terrible anti-consumer product and a bad patent.

Are we all supposed to feel sympathy for this guy? This is an example of government doing something right! I freaking hate it when a mistyped URL takes me to some crappy fake search results ad page. I can only imagine how misleading this must be for the elderly or less tech-savvy.

And no, I don't feel sorry that your crap-producing company got eaten by your crappy competitors because the government didn't let you build a "moat" against competition from fellow crap-peddlers.

Good riddance to this troll!

I might add that just because you're earning revenue does not mean you're doing anything productive or useful.

What a surprise: The Wall Street Journal using any and every possible pretext to attack government. This looks like nothing more than a setup piece to be quoted by members of Congress when attacking the FCC.

This fellow faffs about with error pages on taxpayers' money and has the guts to complain about it!

WTF is wrong with the world?

> Early on, we had asked them to reward our innovation with a patent, effectively establishing a moat around our business that we hoped would deter competitors.

There must be prior art in the form of people hosting 'nearly URLs' or 'typo URLs' with many ads.

Still operational - http://www.paxfire.com/

And is suing people that filed suit for 50 million - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxfire

How is delivering adds and offering no value whatsoever "innovation"?

TL;DR: "The government gave me $100,000 in free money to pursue a slimy business idea, which I failed at (and kept the cash). My sense of entitlement is outraged! Why does the government hate me so?"

The people at CIT GAP, from whom they got their funding, are cool people who are trying to do good work. I hate the insinuation that they had any negative effect on this company, enen if it's not strongly implied. They do uncapped convertible notes on their investments, it's awesome.

How did the competition survive without patents? Or maybe it wasn't the governments fault that they failed after all...

> relevant search results

I hate it when a ISP does that. If I mistype an URL I want to get a 404 or server not found. Not ads which are certainly not relevant in that case.

To me this article is on the same sympathy level as SEOs complaining about Google updates.

Brilliant comment below the article: http://allthingsd.com/20130107/hi-im-from-the-government-and...

The other annoying thing is that he is assuming every DNS request comes from a browser. Imagine the cock-ups when you are writing a web tool and you are relying on valid DNS msgs for your app's logic path.

Government's role is to enforce law and order to ensure a level playing field that all players can have a fair chance. Glad the government stepped in this time.

I hope this guy crawls into a dark hole and never emerges to start another company.

I like this because it deals with the very real complexity of actually innovating in any area involving lots of regulation and governments.

Needs a little tightening up, though.

Do you think this specific company was really doing valuable innovation though? Mucking about with DNS... there's not much tightening up of that story you can do to improve it.

Redirecting errors is not "actually innovating". Even if they were doing something useful, respectable and not leeching on international infrastructure that they did nothing to help set up, to expect a technical patent for this business idea is patently absurd!

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