My ongoing battle against Comcast DNS hijacking

First most people do not care and even find it useful and second those who do care can fixed the problem by using another DNS server.

Second it is not hijacking as you went to the DNS server and placed a name it could not find and then it gave you a search page with your wrong name and suggestions of what the hell you could had been trying to reach.

Most people would find that helpful even if there are also some advs on the page.

In other word you making a mountain out of a very tiny mole hill.

Bill,

This page isn't useful to anyone and it isn't helpful. It is worse than the alternative (i.e. Comcast just return a Page not found error).

Can you honestly say there is anyone who wants to get a search page when they type "able2know" (without the .org) instead of being taken directly to the page? And even if they did want to be taken to a search page, why wouldn't any rational person choose "Google" or "Yahoo" or any real search Engine. Anyone would want to be able to choose which search page they were sent to. Comcast doesn't even give you this choice.

You might be able to say that this isn't a big deal. But, I am not the only one who is annoyed about this.

But to say this is "helpful" is simply ridiculous. If they wanted to be helpful they would give you an option including an easy way to to turn the damn thing off completely and maybe even a way to choose a different search engine.

This is Comcast making money selling the eyeball of their customers. This is something they might be able to get away with. But, forcing people into their advertising page with no easy way to turn it off sure as hell isn't helpful to anyone.

Maybe if they can make money some additional way then they won't raise our bill. I know, that's probably a forlorn hope.

Unfortunately, Comcast (cable companies) are sometimes the only/best option people have for high speed internet access, and no company is required to sell us internet access in a "vanilla" form. All these companies are free to sell us whatever they want and we can either buy it or not. This particular issue is not one of the battles I would waste my time on however.

One of these days our providers are going to start throttling the bandwidth that we receive from particular sites (like NetFlix) so that they can try to influence our choices for who to buy content from. There are bills going through congress as we speak which address this type of thing, and I would rather spend my time fighting those upcoming battles.

No. Companies are not free to sell us whatever they want. Customers are important and companies can't do things that piss off customers. This is a bad thing for customers and I think they get away with it because most customers are unaware.

You are implying that a customer's only course of action when they are unhappy is to not buy a product. This is completely incorrect. There are other options from complaining in a public space to legislative or legal options.

You point out that Comcast has a monopoly in places. This makes it more important for customers to raise their voice when they do something wrong. And if you google "Comcast DNS hijacking" you will see there are quite a few of us who are upset about this.

I agree about throttling and I agree that throttling is a more important issue than hijacking. You are seeing customers expressing quite a bit of displeasure about this issue as well. One can be upset with both things.

Pointing out all the ways Comcast disrespects their customers pressures Comcast (and other monopolistic companies) to be a little bit better citizens.