Time Warner joins the ranks of big name ISPs that automatically redirect unresolved domain lookups to a company-owned landing page. I realized this today when Road Runner, Time Warner’s broadband service, redirected me to a results page for a misspelled domain.
The service was enabled by default. They do offer a means to opt-out. But, apparently it might not be that easy. Because of companies like Charter, I have to test if its is a true fix:
Charter’s way to "opt-out" is to put a cookie on your computer to redirect you to a fake page not found screen. In reality they are sending you to a copy of the IE page, which is amusing, because when in firefox or any other browser it still points you to that. This still defeats the purpose and is not true DNS, because it is still returning a response and pointing you to their fake page not found page.
Verisign was sued for this same practice in 2003. The case was a bit different because the company is at the very the top of the domain structure. It really did break the Internet, for everyone! With ISPs serving as a buffering layer between customers and the Internet, the argument can be made if one chooses the broadband service, he must abide by the Terms.
Time Warner’s trying to make money on this move. The preferences tell it. Along with redirecting non-existent domains, the service has two other preferences: the service will correct typos (google.cmo -> google.com) and filter "adult-oriented content" from the landing pages. The porn filter is enabled by default. The thinking being, "we already have you on our site, we don’t care what ads we show you, nudes or Paris Hilton." The typo-correction filter is disabled by default. Since those landing pages generate revenue, the typo-correction would lead to less page views and smaller revenue.
I see no reason for alarm. In fact, the service is beneficial for most customers while discretely generating revenue. For instance, it will keep a computer-illiterate user from starring at a spinning cursor only for the web browser to timeout. Most people will like that. Such little annoyances only waste time, promote confusion, and further complicate a poorly understood technology. However, I am not like most users and would appreciate a bit more heads up on such a change that might cost me an abundance of time debugging code later down the road… Glad I found this in a browser!
Interesting fun fact I learned from this as well: Time Warner’s sleeping around. The Road Runner homepage has it’s search "enahanced by Google" while the redirect landing pages are "powered by Yahoo".
