DNS Redirect Hubbub

When you try looking up a website that doesn’t actually exist, you generally receive an error message from your browser. But if you use the Canadian ISP Rogers, you’ll instead get a Rogers-sponsored page with ads. This practice has tech news site ArsTechnica up in arms. I guess Ars believes that internet users have a god-given right to their browser’s error messages.

But ad-supported error pages provide more revenue for ISPs, allowing them to lower prices. And, if you don’t like the way your ISP returns invalid DNS lookups, you can (in addition to switching to another ISP) run your own DNS operations, using free web software like Open DNS.

ISP DNS redirection: not a crisis in need of government intervention.