Sunday, July 20, 2008

Rogers Cable Violating Net Neutrality Tenets

Via DigitalHome.ca (Canada) -

In what appears to be a violation of Net Neutrality by Rogers Cable, Digital Home readers are reporting that Rogers High Speed Internet service has begun redirecting customers "Server not found pages" to webpages laden with Rogers advertising.

The hijacking of the webpage appears to be attempt by Rogers to use its Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to cash in on the mistakes of its users.

The "Cannot Find Server" web page is typically shown to a user when they type in a web address that does not exist. The purpose of the page is to inform the user that the web site does not exist or a lookup error has occurred so a correction can be made.

Using DPI technology, Rogers inspects the web address request and if it determines that a web surfer has mistakenly entered an invalid web address, Rogers redirects the request and serves up an ad laden webpage selling Rogers products and services rather than allowing the informative "Cannot find server" web page to be displayed.

The result is a confused web browser who has no idea why his or her browser has been hijacked and is now on a Rogers search page.

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