While home in West Virginia for the holidays, I had an interesting Internet experience.<\/p>\n
I noticed when I Googled “Amazon” from my browser search bar, I got the Amazon home page, not the Google search results page I expected.<\/p>\n
After some digging, I found that the ISP (Frontier Communications) was hijacking all traffic to www.google.com<\/strong>, and (in at least this case) inserting their own results. \u00a0For my search, they were redirecting to Amazon.com with their affiliate code, presumably to scrape some commission dollars.<\/p>\n The technical details are documented here<\/a>.<\/p>\n I know ISPs have been hijacking DNS for a while for typo-traffic, but I’d never seen a case where they were directly hijacking Google searches. \u00a0It seems egregious to me, and I’m paying more attention to the net neutrality debate. \u00a0Assuming Frontier has standard Amazon affiliate terms, why should Amazon be paying Frontier merely for a subscriber who Googles “amazon”? \u00a0(And we all end up paying in the end, with higher product prices).<\/p>\n I ended up writing letters about this to Amazon (Jeff Bezos) and Frontier’s CEO. \u00a0 We’ll see if anything comes back.<\/p>\n UPDATE<\/strong>: \u00a0I heard back immediately from Maggie Wilderotter, Frontier’s CEO. \u00a0 They’ve investigated, found a vendor doing this in violation of Fronter’s business rules, and have shut it down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Frontier Communications hijacking subscriber Google searches for affiliate dollars Continue reading