Up here in the hinterlands of Canada, you may have heard about the giant uproar with Rogers, our only provider who can support, and therefore, sell the iPhone — specifically with the bald-faced inequitable profiteering of its data and voice rates in comparison with other countries (i.e. the United States). You may have also heard that it buckled under public pressure, and eventually relented with a marginally improved plan, so long as you sign up before August.

Well, I hope their public relations folk are well rested, because they may need to use their spinning techniques on the tech-loving public once more.

Why, you may ask?

Well, as pointed out by an astute Rogers customer, John Forsythe, Rogers is actively hi-jacking unused domain names, as a “clever” means of scooping up type-in traffic for monetization purposes. Specifically, they’re re-directing unused domain names to their own pages, with Yahoo advertising on the top.

Mr. Forsythe blythely points out that this even extends to subdomains that don’t exist on real domains that do. For example, there’s the ironic example of the non-existant subdomain of Google (example.google.com) which redirects to a page with Yahoo advertising.

Yes — wtf indeed.

Even if this doesn’t raise your ire, if you own a blog or website of any kind, you can see how it might, in fact, cause that rising sensation of bile in your throat, because Rogers (in Canada, anyway) is monetizing subdomain traffic from *YOUR* domain as well.

As John recalls, this isn’t the first time this kind of type-squatting chicanery has ever taken place; VeriSign had tried something like this in 2003, and as a result had a huge bulge in its traffic numbers, with its own site VeriSign.com becoming the 20th most visited (and then reaching the 10 ten) site on the Internets. Yes, the numbers were provided by Alexa, but it still gives some scope of the kind of traffic bumpage these kind of shennanigans can provide.

Eventually VeriSign and ICANN settled things, but it carries on for quite a few cable companies in the States; Rogers, I believe is the first Canadian one to adopt these kinds of practices.

This issue is a hotly contested one, and having exceeded the limits of what I actually know about the topic (extremely minute) in the first paragraph, I’ll kick it back to an interesting discussion at BroadBand Reports.

Post Script: In spite of the unashamedly attention-grabbing headline, unlike the iPhone which has mass commercial appeal, and in spite of the fact there are real issues around the concept of ‘neutrality’, I think its doubtful that this topic will ever raise enough ire to get to the mainstream press.

// via: reddit