Matthouse

Consumer ISP tirade

Last year sometime, I discovered through my day-job that Qwest DSL was hijacking DNS queries for non-existent domain names, and redirecting them to a search page.  For my day-job, this problem manifests itself as employees being unable to access corporate resources even when connected to VPN.  After about 3 seconds of troubleshooting (isn’t vnc great?), I found this:

This innocent looking page is actually quite bad…  It has many implications – for starters, Qwest is almost certainly making money on this page, due to the search traffic.  The privacy aspects are chilling – who knows what information Qwest is passing along to Yahoo (the search provider), or what information they’re storing about what domains you mis-type (or what domains you type correctly, so they can advertise more accurately when you do make a mistake).  The whole thing scares the willies out of me.

Thankfully, there’s a clever link in the upper right corner that says “Opt out of this service”.  Once you click that, the page changes and you have to click through to “Frequently asked questions”, and select the one that says “Can I opt out of this service?” (the fourth one down at present), and then read through the answer until you find the one-word link, and then acknowledge that you really want out of their super-awesome service by clicking “No, I don’t want to stay in this service”…  Dude, Seriously?!?!?  My past experience is that, once you do this, you are correctly and permanently opted out, but we have an employee that went through this exercise last night, and is still getting the search page.

It seems that Comcast, the “other” internet service, has jumped on the bandwagon.  I received a ticket for a similar issue, and after brief troubleshooting, I asked “Do you have a Qwest DSL?”  The answer was, “Nope, Comcast”.  Guess what though, same problem:

Comcast is making it even more complicated to “opt out”.  When you click “Disable this error service”, you’re taken to a page with a link that prompts you to sign into “MyComcast”.  A smaller link has step-by-step instructions for opting out, and the first step is going to a site called dns-opt-out.comcast.net.  Well, whadya know, “Page cannot be displayed”.  Pretty amazing that the only way to remove a so-called feature that is intended to steer you away from those totally confusing error pages is to go to a site that cannot be displayed????

OK, look.  I get it, I understand.  We’re all in tough times, and ISP’s are no different.  People are downgrading their service, price-shopping for the best deals.  They’re also watching less TV (and less premium channels), and generally spending less money.  However, that’s absolutely no excuse to hijack one’s DNS lookups – seriously…

I’m of the opinion that services like this are anti-competitive, immoral, possibly illegal, and generally objectionable.  I believe people should email the FTC and the FCC and complain.  Does anybody disagree?  Can you explain why this is a good service?