MightyFunk

There’s a say­ing which goes, “if you don’t like some­thing, don’t do it.” Or rather in this case, “don’t use it.” Unfor­tu­nately, in the case of my Inter­net Ser­vice Provider, there really isn’t any bet­ter alter­na­tive than Com­cast (which I’m effec­tively renam­ing “COMCRAP” in the Boston area. I could go with sec­ond best, which is Ver­i­zon FIOS, but to be per­fectly hon­est, Comcast’s over­all ser­vice and pric­ing is much bet­ter. I do obtain rel­a­tively fast Inter­net speeds, good up-time, and the cus­tomer sup­port (when prob­lems do arise) is gen­er­ally top-notch. How­ever, I am cur­rently tak­ing issue with Comcast’s lat­est “method of con­duct­ing business.”

You see, Com­cast has now engaged in the prac­tice of DNS Hijack­ing. DNS Hijack­ing means that if you type in an invalid web­site address (whether inten­tional or through a mis­take), instead of serv­ing up a “neu­tral” HTTP 404 “page not found” error page that’s been tra­di­tional since the advent of the Web, it auto­mat­i­cally redi­rects you to a Com­cast web­site with search results and ads. This only applies to Com­cast cus­tomers — which hap­pens to num­ber in the mil­lions in the New York city and Boston metro areas. Com­cast also has a foothold in other areas through­out the United States. So we are talk­ing that this effects a large swath of con­sumers through­out the country.

Com­cast is also not the only Inter­net Ser­vice Provider that engages in DNS Hijack­ing — more and more ISPs are fol­low­ing this prac­tice on an almost daily basis. To test whether or not your ISP engages in “Domain Hijack­ing”, point your website’s browser to a domain name that prob­a­bly doesn’t exist. In this exam­ple, we can all try going to this fic­tional website’s URL:

http://www.comcraps.com

If the result­ing page sud­denly serves up Com­cast, then you’ve been DNS Hijacked by them. If it serves up any­thing but a ‘404 page not found’ or an ‘inter­nal server error’, than you’ve been hijacked — most likely by your own Inter­net Ser­vice Provider.

Now, you might ask your­self, “what’s the big deal here?!?”

Well, I’ll give you one exam­ple. I have another blog that acci­den­tally went offline today. My email client kept on spit­ting out errors that it could not con­nect to my web­site. So when I went online to check to see if the web­site was still up, and I got auto­mat­i­cally redi­rected to a Com­cast search page. I was pretty ticked off. I wanted poten­tial vis­i­tors to my web­site to see an error that the page was offline — and not another web­site serv­ing up fried food in it’s place.

Now just imag­ine if you were a web­site or busi­ness owner and you had to take down the page for a day or two of rou­tine main­te­nance. A cus­tomer or client goes to your web­site to buy some­thing or look up infor­ma­tion, and instead of spit­ting an error or say­ing that the page can­not be found, it sends you to Com­cast or any other web­site of their choos­ing. Does that seem right? I wouldn’t think so. But let’s say that you’re “OKAY” with that — what would you think if instead of going to Com­cast, this blog con­stantly showed up as the land­ing page instead? How about a web­site fea­tur­ing a big photo of my but­tocks in a thong? For­ever and ever — even when you acci­den­tally typed in a wrong web­site address. It would be really annoy­ing (if not to say a lit­tle bit disturbing.)

Now Com­crap has “kindly” offered up an “opt-out” pro­gram. My spec­u­la­tion is that they will def­i­nitely receive a high num­ber of con­fused and agi­tated cus­tomers in this “smooth move” of theirs. They “have to kindly” pro­vide this “opt-out” in order to main­tain some sem­blance of “good cus­tomer rela­tions.” The one prob­lem with the opt-out pro­gram is that it requires the Com­crap cus­tomer to locate and find their computer’s MAC Address — which for the aver­age per­son is a tech­ni­cal feat of com­puter knowl­edge. By no means is find­ing the MAC address obvi­ous to the aver­age per­son. ***I could actu­ally post “how” to find the MAC address here in a few steps, but for the sake of get­ting you upset with Com­crap — I’ll let you try to fig­ure it out and take it up with their tech­ni­cal support.***

So hope­fully you’re start­ing to get some of the pic­ture as to what they are attempt­ing to do here. In a nut­shell, they are try­ing to make more money through your acci­den­tal typ­ing or through non-existent web­sites. They’ll try to “spin it” with their pub­lic rela­tions machine by say­ing that they’re pro­vid­ing you a “use­ful ser­vice.” They may even “claim” that this prac­tice “saves the con­sumer money through adver­tise­ments.” The poten­tial for abuse by this cor­po­ra­tion and other DNS Hijak­ers is enor­mous. They are lit­er­ally try­ing to shove them­selves DOWN YOUR THROAT with­out your per­mis­sion or knowl­edge. And if you find that sort of behav­ior com­pletely accept­able, than you’re not the type of per­son that I would like to know.

In the greater scheme of things, this issue harks back to what some con­sumer rights advo­cates call “Net Neu­tral­ity.” Accord­ing to Wikipedia’s arti­cle on Net Neu­tral­ity, it is defined by: “A [neu­tral net­work] is one that is free of restric­tions on con­tent, sites, or plat­forms, on the kinds of equip­ment that may be attached, and on the modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion allowed, as well as one where com­mu­ni­ca­tion is not unrea­son­ably degraded by other com­mu­ni­ca­tion streams.” Since Com­cast meters and lim­its your band­width, it is my argu­ment that they should not be serv­ing pages which causes extended load times and run­ning up extra (albeit minis­cule) band­width passed on to their con­sumers. By hijack­ing, they are effec­tively going against the prin­ci­ples and advo­cacy of net neutrality.

The web itself is founded on gov­ern­ment research and tax payer’s dol­lars. In order to form some stan­dards that every web­site devel­oper and designer adheres to, the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium or W3C was formed to imple­ment com­mon prac­tices.  The W3C in essence has made rules which every designer and devel­oper should fol­low if the Inter­net is to main­tain some sem­blance of orga­ni­za­tion and ease of use. The sta­tuse code, HTTP 404 was des­ig­nated by the web’s founder Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. In sum­mary, Com­cast has over­ruled the tra­di­tional W3C prac­tice and stan­dards by insert­ing their own rules on how you should view the Internet.

A lit­tle arti­cle on the his­tory of the HTTP 404 sta­tus can be found here:

http://www.plinko.net/404/history.asp

I find this prac­tice extremely deplorable. I did not pay to have adver­tise­ments served to me with­out my per­mis­sion. Per­haps, instead of hav­ing an “opt-out” fea­ture, they should have pro­vided sane peo­ple an “opt-in” fea­ture instead. But we know that know sane per­son would ever sign up for ads. It’s just a mat­ter of time before con­sumer advo­cates and the gen­eral pub­lic raises hell over such decep­tive prac­tices. I can forsee anti-trust law­suits being levied against Com­cast for essen­tially over­rid­ing our surf­ing and view­ing behavior.

If you’re like me and take issue with this mal­prac­tice, I would sug­gest that you write your sen­a­tor, write arti­cles and blog about this, and edu­cate or dis­cuss with oth­ers the poten­tial areas of abuse these providers are engag­ing in.

–Charles

As Comcast’s motto goes, “It’s Comcraptic!!!”