Rogers Hijacks DNS, Puts Yahoo! Ads on Google's Subdomains
Rogers, a huge cable internet provider in Canada, has decided to hijack all unregistered domains, and replace them with Yahoo! advertisements. This means Rogers users who type in a domain that doesn't exist, are now getting Yahoo ads instead of the normal "not found" error.
Looks like Google AND Yahoo are going to be pissed. This would bring in hundreds of dollars in revenue though for all those ads. Wonder what will happen when Google finds out, im pretty sure Google can take them down...
It would bring a lot more the hundreds of dollars of ads in. Rogers is a pretty big company and I don't think they would back down to Google.
__________________ █ AC/DC Talk - Talk about one of the greatest bands today. █ ChickenSMS - Let your visitors send free text messages. █ Blow Up Your Video - Read all about AC/DC and its members. █ No Cry Server - For gaming server admins.
You can sue someone for anything.. be interesting to see how this plays out. Roger's legal team must have looked into the legality before hand, I'd think.
Use an alternative DNS provider like http://opendns.com/ if you don't like it. It's free.
ISPs, ideally, should give subscribers the choice to opt-out though.
If they were just serving up ads on non-existent domains, that would be one thing. However, by including non-existent subdomains on established domains, I think they'll find themselves getting sued sooner than later and probably by more than one company.
I'm not sure how they could argue that they aren't directly profiting off of Google's TM. The people who are trying to go to those non-existent subdomains are obviously attempting to access Google's site, be it unsuccessfully. I would imagine in most cases, these attempts are due to typos of an existing subdomain.
my goodness. serving up ads on a non-existent subdomain is absolutely pushing it. everyone should stick to directories instead of subdomains if this bullsh_t keeps up.
is there some way to return 301s or 302s for wildcard subdomains through mod_rewrite?
According to people with indirect knowledge of the numbers at Verizon - in order to imagine the cash flow, you're going to have to invest in a bigger imagination first.
