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

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

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.<p>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.<p>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".

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.<p>Heres what the ICANN says:<p><i>• 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.</i> [1]<p>[1]: <a href="http://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/nxdomain-substitution-harms-24nov09-en.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/nxdomain-substi...</a>

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Edit: It was VeriSign not Verizon.

"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."<p>"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."<p>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.<p>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 <i>add value</i> to society? The system is rigged and everyone is out to get me.<p>Uh huh. <i>The government</i> 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 <i>the</i> 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"<p>"One suit against us, a proposed class action, came from an elderly woman in New York City"<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>Good riddance to this troll!<p>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 <i>on taxpayers' money</i> and has the guts to complain about it!<p>WTF is wrong with the world?

&#62; 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.<p>There must be prior art in the form of people hosting 'nearly URLs' or 'typo URLs' with many ads.

Still operational - <a href="http://www.paxfire.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.paxfire.com/</a><p>And is suing people that filed suit for 50 million - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxfire" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxfire</a>

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...

&#62; relevant search results<p>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.<p>To me this article is on the same sympathy level as SEOs complaining about Google updates.

Brilliant comment below the article: <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20130107/hi-im-from-the-government-and-im-here-to-help/#comment-760034039" rel="nofollow">http://allthingsd.com/20130107/hi-im-from-the-government-and...</a>

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.<p>Needs a little tightening up, though.