When I saw the title I first thought they saw this forum thread about how a Canadian business has switched away from using JotForm and how they are considering to stop purchasing from all US based online companies:
http://www.jotform.com/answers/77171-Recent-Domain-Suspensio...
By the way, Techdirt's Mike is such a great guy. He has been very supportive and he even introduced us to some lawyers.
What does "Get corporate membership with EFF" mean?
Anyhow, I totally agree that the gov't is out of control. It isn't just with this copyright stuff either.
I sell electronic cigarettes and have an innovation to improve adoption with smokers. My product will undoubtedly be proven many times safer than smoking and more effective in helping people quit, but we face seizures and the threat of regulations which will shutter small businesses like mine.
I'm doing #4, "Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country." as soon as I can afford to.
What does "Get corporate membership with EFF" mean?
Financially support an organisation that will defend your rights. It's like paying a retainer to a lawyer. You might not need them, but they will probably help fight for what's important to your business.
serious question: were you aware who you trying to compete with (or step on a toe) before going into this business? I cannot imagine being successful in such a field competing with tobacoo brands who have such a strong lobbying representation.
Big Tobacco doesn't sell ecigs, yet anyhow. The more open opposition is from Big Pharma and those who make their living pushing "quit or die" vs. harm reduction.
I just found a way to better serve consumers what they wanted.. pretty standard entrepreneurial story. If everyone let the 90%+ fail rate of businesses scare them from trying, the world would seriously suck.
Part of what I need to do to succeed is recognizing the threat of legislation and finding a better place to do business. My point was that the ridiculousness of SOPA and such isn't new and hurts other parts of the economy too. (and I am genuinely curious what #0 means)
That makes you even more dangerous than if you sold regular cigarettes, because e-cigs have the potential to change the game - to change their entire industry. And big companies hate it when the industry has to radically change from a model that worked for decades.
was about to say the same. he really didnt see that his successful business could kill 200 yrs old competitor with billions of never-ending [habit] profits?
I see a time in the not to distant future where people in other countries start copying well used and know US sites and hosting them in say China. OK, China is scary, but what about, say, Poland? A kinda of whole website piracy. It might work because they can simply market the safe as being safe from the US government.
I'm thinking of sites like that forms site that suddenly got taken down wrecking the day of, what, millions of customers? How many of them might changed to an identical site that guarantees no US gov interference? Such people might not even realise its not the same people.
You're also scaring web consumers to pick non-US businesses. Do I want to purchase a service that can be shut down by the US govt with no notice whatsoever? No.
This wasn't possible in USA when they passed the Pro IP Act, just like they wanted to pass SOPA now. But people weren't aware of it, so it did pass. I'm afraid takedowns like these will continue until the Pro IP Act is repealed.
This is why it's so important citizens are aware of what goes on in Washington, and move to stop a bill if it's too dangerous. Because if it does pass, it will probably be a decade or more before people even start thinking about repealing a bad law. What's worse is by then, a few more bills will pass to enforce that one.
The US is still a great place for business, IMO, but sometimes I feel like I should be wearing one of those t-shirts that says "I'm with stupid", with an arrow pointing to DC.
A lot of this is due to the current US control of the .com namespace.
I wonder what'll happen when/if the US shuts down some non-US business's .com, and that business starts getting court orders to force local ISPs to resolve that. It would either lead to a split in the .com namespace, or international diplomatic agreements on DNS (like how there is international maritime law about what happens in international waters). This would make the USA no longer have control over it.
The reason we have not submitted an application for YCombinator is actually simply that we perceive the US to be a bad place to be incorporated. Not just for the reason stated in this article of course, hacker news is frequently littered with other reasons as well. My understanding is the requirement to incorporate as a Delaware company is fairly strict requirement for YC companies. Can someone verify this? (we're already incorporated in Singapore).
There are good reasons to incorporate in US states like Delaware, it is not coincidence that so many (non-YC) tech companies are incorporated there. Note that you incorporate in US states, not in "the US", and states offer very different jurisdictions. Here is a quick explanation of why selection of corporate jurisdiction is important:
1) You want to select a jurisdiction that has clean, flexible, and stable set of corporate laws that have already been through judicial review. This provides a robust foundation for corporate structure with few legal unknowns or political risks.
2) Important for investors, the corporate laws must be fair to all parties involved. For example, a jurisdiction with corporate laws that allow a minority shareholder or employee to screw the majority shareholders or hold the company hostage is bad and greatly increases investor risk. There are many jurisdictions that are like this, even in the US. It is one of the reasons you never see tech companies incorporated in California, for example, even though Silicon Valley is there.
3) A jurisdiction that operates under English Common Law is convenient because it is the common basis of contract law used in business, particularly if it involves parties in multiple jurisdictions. Delaware is a nice example of such a jurisdiction with a long, sane, and mature judicial history.
Jurisdictions like Delaware are among the very best in the world for everyone involved if you are building an investor-backed business. Startups that are not incorporated there often have to reincorporate in a place like Delaware as a condition of investment. It is all about having a stable, scalable, and fair set of legal rules on which to build the company.
The average startup faces much more risk from being in a poor jurisdiction than whatever risk you perceive from being incorporated in the US. Investors know this and proper jurisdiction selection is an inexpensive way of reducing the total risk to startup success.
Lots of very very good reasons for Delaware, yes. It totally makes sense for yc to have this as a rigid rule.. Still I'm interested to know if they have ever made an exception for anyone, and if so who and why.
After reading various reasons as to why it's bad to be incorporated in the US, you held off on applying to YC, but you are still using GoDaddy? Moving from Singapore to the US is a hard decision. Switching from a sleazy registrar to one that isn't, isn't.
Good observation... the only reason backrecord.com is still with godaddy is lack of time to make sure I have a process worked out to do it without any downtime. I actually transferred more than 20 domains because of SOPA and can assure you the others will be transferred at some point relatively soon. backrecord.net for instance is no longer with godaddy.
I don't have the time to look for it now, but I recall, somewhere in the myriad of recent HN comments on GoDaddy, there was at least one where the person stated that they switched with no downtime. If you find it, you could ask them if they did anything in particular to achieve that outcome.
Regardless, I think that, ultimately, when it comes to DotCOM, it does not matter which registrar you use, or where your business is located, because it seems as if the US will continue with, and expand upon, its various efforts at interfering with that TLD. I have a pressing need to register a bunch of domains, and it's obvious that I should use DotCOM (simply for the purpose of preventing those names from being taken by someone else in the most popular TLD), but I don't know to which TLD(s) my DotCOMs should point. I've investigated a bunch of them, and I'm leaning towards DotTEL, because it has a few nice features, particularly its uniqueness in that every webpage is generated dynamically from content stored in DNS. Of course, DotTEL can't replace most websites, but it could act as a gateway to your content.
Using 100% renewable energy (not just co2-neutralized), located in Iceland (they have sane IP laws AFAIK), and claiming to be "AWS EC2 and S3 drop-in replacement".
At this point, use of GoDaddy at any point should be noted in any Due Diligence process by investors.
If the founders are unable to identify using GoDaddy as an unacceptable risk and are unable to quickly find an alternative, then one might justifiably come to the conclusion that said founders don't know what they're doing.
If an investor is unable to recognize the risk, then one might justifiably come to the conclusion that they don't know what they're doing, and should stick to Real Estate Development and Direct Mail advertising.
Personally, I like gandi.net for domain registration and hosting. They're not the cheapest, but they're not in the US.
By the way, Techdirt's Mike is such a great guy. He has been very supportive and he even introduced us to some lawyers.