“Hi, I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help”
13th May 2013
But my experience — both on the way up and the way down — is a good window into one of the central questions facing President Obama as he prepares to take the oath of office for a second time on Jan. 21: What role, if any, should the government play in nurturing entrepreneurs and, by extension, jobs, in America? In our case, we really had no expectation that government would play any role whatsoever. Unfortunately, though, we were wrong. Dead wrong. It did play a role and, for the most part, it was not a good one. It doesn’t have to be that way; there are fixes that can be made.
You may not be interested in the fucking government, but the government is interested in fucking you.
The mere debate, however, prompted tremulous bureaucrats at the U.S. Commerce Dept. — congenitally allergic to even the slightest whiff of controversy — to tell the registries (who are regulated by Commerce) to knock it off. We thought the complaints were nonsense. After all, how bad could it be to get rid of errors and replace them with relevant search results? But it didn’t matter. The government had, effectively, dealt us a death blow.
Your tax dollars at work … or not, as the case may be.
Despite repeated efforts at reform, almost always stymied by political gridlock in Washington, federal rules make it a snap, and potentially quite lucrative, for people to file civil lawsuits, no matter how ludicrous.
My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.