Quite a few people are using alternative DNS services, like Google DNS (I use Google DNS) to navigate the internet.
However as pointed out by one reader to TheDomains.com, one of the alternative DNS services is now blocking parked pages.
Most troubling the service, dnsadvantage.com is owned by Neustar, which provides registry services for .biz, .us, kids.us, .cn, .tw, .travel, .tel extensions and is actively seeking new gTLD’s to add under its control and management.
The domain to test with is:
Tackboard.com (not one of our domains)
Of course if you view the page and your using a DNS service other than Neustars it will resolve to a parked page.
But if your using NeuStar’s DNS service this is what you get, a message that the page is blocked:
“”
“”Warning!
For your protection, you have been temporarily blocked from accessing www.tackboard.com. The website has been blocked for the following reasons:
- Parked Domain: Site may contain excessive advertising including pop-up or pop-under advertising”””
This is certain horrible for domainers, as Neustar continues to grow their alternative DNS service.
To make matters worse, look at what else appears on the page blocked by DNSadvantage.com?
PPC ads
DNSadvantage PPC ads.
So they are blocking the ads on your parked domains and they are serving up their own PPC ads in it place
Wow.
Nice.
I would hope all domainers would follow suit.
The truth of the matter is that parked domains simply don’t provide that great of a service. If people wanted to see a bunch of ads then they would do a google search and look through the adwords. I think that parked domains are going to generate less and less money on average from this point on (notice I did NOT say that they are going to be worth less and less, just generate less money through parking).
We are already seeing the drop in parking revenue.
In defense of parked domain owners, there might possibly be a legal claim here, I would think it would be a constitutional claim on freedom of speech and censorship but I wouldn’t hold my breath that it would be successful. The entire world hates parked pages and that will definitely have an influence in the courtroom (although the law would be on the domainers side).
The internet is changing, parking domains will continue to deteriorate, we are coming to an age where the money is made via business creation.
I think the local ISP I use goes through dnsadvantage too, I recieve the same errors when trying to visit parked sites (ex. gnda.com)
It is a real shame to discover something like this, especially since they throw in their own PPC ads. Maybe they have different directors/boards covering each service, and the right people don’t know about this, or maybe they just want to keep all the monies for themselves. That just ain’t right, hopefully it will be changed now that you called them out 😀
So what does Ken of Neustar who attends/sits on panels of domain conference have to say? Someone needs to ask/have them amend it.
This sort of system has been around for years. How do people think these “alternative dns” providers would make money? Most of the time, from the data they get via the dns requests and of course from NX domains and blocking parking services.
Do you have a screenshot?
couldnt these alternate DNS systems create there own TLD?
“excessive advertising” as determined by who???
if we eliminated “excessive advertising” that would mean cleaning up the majority of the most trafficked websites, “parked” or “unparked”
are they kidding? the web is so bogged down with ads it is a joke – and it is just beginning.
but hey, this is a good thing, right? “e-commerce”.
with no advertising the web would be next to “worthless” to the vast majority of the public
it would be like the early days:
only useful to the military, academics, etc.
oh how terrible that would be. we might actually force people to read and evaluate research supported by data instead of feeding them pure hype.
does anyone even appreciate google scholar?
the web without advertising is like public, non-profit TV – what sort of viewership do those channels get?
excessive advertising. right. tell that to your favourite TV channel.
as for “dns service”, how long before the internet using public wakes up?
dns is not that complicated.
whoever runs the dns server you connect to controls what you see as “the internet”. these dns services are not transparent. they are meddling with what the user can access.
this opendns trend is like sitefinder all over again. opt-in makes little difference if one doesn’t understand what opendns is doing. users only know the web is loaded with junk and scams. what if users knew how to avoid all that junk themselves, without opendns, etc.?
people can understand the difference between a phonebook and directory assistance; do we really think they can never understand dns? if they get a clue that will be the end of this game. once people understand dns, it’s over.
small free dns server listening on 127.0.0.1 plus a good hosts file and the *average user* is as good as you can be. (the average user, i.e. the consumer. *not* the Fortune 500, not a university, not other website administrators, etc. their needs are different.) take away the average users and dns service is only so lucrative.
how far do opendns, neustar, etc. think they can go with this? sooner or later people ae going to get a clue what’s going on.
it would be very easy to put a “net neutrality” spin on it. while dns terminology is poorly understood, people do understand what net neutrality means, enough to have an opinion.
aol got away with keeping people off the “real” internet in the early days. but does that still work today?
it is for users (the mkt) to decide how much advertising is “too much”.
this is essentially a contest over who controls what ads the user sees. whether it’s the dns admin or the domain name owner, in either case, the user is going to see ads.
users are going to figure this out, eventually.
this just my opinion.
Don’t Neustar realize that if they alienate domainers the entire .US registry will shrink to about 45 domains actually in use by real users? 🙂
yes sharam. you can run your own “root” and “tlds”, easily. you could have any domain names you wanted. no icann approval necessary. .elvis, whatever you wanted. it’s all possible and easy as pie. but who besides you would use it?
you have to convince people to use your dns server. that’s the catch. opendns, google and neustar have done this. people are signing up. if you convince people to use your dns server, you can run your own “internet” with full control over domain names. not that anyone is going to do this, but you could. very easily.
companies have done this for many years, just for their employees and customers. it’s called an “intranet”. that’s just a name. it’s dns, just like the internet.
i think people fear talking about dns in plain terms (no esoteric lingo) because they think if people decided to experiment, it could create “chaos”. purely hypothetical of course- no proof. experimentation is the key to innovation. when dns was adopted, the “internet” was only used by organisations. there were no “home users” as there are today.
when we choose to use someone else’s dns server, we give them control over what we can access. whether they filter out hosts or not, whether they return or redirect nxdomain, what TLD’s are recognised, etc. is up to them. maybe we think they never will meddle with these things. but they can. there are no laws to stop them- users have consented to using their dns servers. opendns and neustar are already redirecting and filtering. they are meddling with things. how far can they go? we’ll see.
the information that is used to run dns for the “public internet” is, of course, public.
it is simply a list of names matched to numbers.
as is any telephone directory.
if users get their own copy of the list (as they are entitled to do), do they need to use dns? do they even need the whole list?
dns is similar “directory assistance”. it looks up a name or number, on demand.
do you call directory assistance every time you make a phone call? when you have a copy of the telephone book?
do you get a new phone book every hour, every week? do the important people and businesses you contact (who know you personally) change their phone number constantly?
dns makes sense for businesses and *large organisations* (such as the ones that developed the original arpanet). for a single end-user, using a good hosts file is *faster*, and *safer* than using dns. that’s only an opinion, but there is ample evidence to back it up.
Is NueStar really growing their alternative DNS to any noticeable measure?
How is this any kind of benefit to anyone but NeuStar?
How is replacing the correct URL’s PPC ads with those belonging to NeuStar saving the client from anything?
Answer to both questions: It is not.
Were NeuStar blocking the parked pages and not presenting the client with their own flavor of PPC that would be one thing, but they are not doing that. Instead, they are simply hijacking traffic from any parked page and directly denying the publisher of said page from any revenue stream by replacing it with their own.
Now, let’s take this a step further. What if NeuStar was to block Google AdWords ads from any site their visitors went to and replaced those with NeuStar coded Google AdWords advertising inline… how do you think THAT would play? Essentially, that is the same thing they are doing here….
I don’t mind a parked page containing targeted ads. However, pop-up and pop-under ads are the worst kind of internet garbage. Should be prohibited across the entire internet … permanently. Anything that interferes with a user’s navigation, or that blocks the user’s view of content, should be banned.
We’re going to get past that intro 30 second ad at the beginning of online videos too! 🙂
feel free to delete my posts if you want. unless you think i’m making sense.
these dns providers want to pretend they are not after the very same users and PPC clicks that “domainers” are after. there is still no content on these pages. what’s the difference?
how is it different?
neustar cut a deal with colombia and is behind .co as well; their marketing copy for it is amusing.
they are after the same PPC clicks as “domainers” (and seem to have a keen interest in typos)
but they are trying to appear more “legitimate”.
they want some of the auction market too, in the way they have set that up, *forcing* potential registrants into an auction if two or more appear to want the same domain.
sick.
who do they think is going to pay those non-refunable application fees and try to register those .co domains?
“domainers” perhaps?
will they also block the .co sites they sell for “excessive advertising”?
I’ll join the boycott. Thank you for the heads up.
Is this all actually true? I just switched my DNS to the Neustar service to test it out and every Sedo parked domain I checked seemed to be working just fine. Tackboard.com also resolves to a parked page.
You can hack the URL to make it look like Google.com is being blocked for parking too.
http://search.dnsadvantage.com/main?InterceptSource=0&ClientLocation=us&ParticipantID=jojno4mnlw24g55i52z569jakm3ningz&FailureMode=9&SearchQuery=&FailedURI=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&AddInType=2&Version=3.0.3&Referer=&Implementation=0&PlatformInfo=DNSA&msgID1=112620&blockedDomain=www.google.com
I use Comodo DNS and they also block parked domains, the site you mention, tackboard, is accessible through Comodo DNS, but many other parked domains are simply blocked.
I find this great, nobody clicks on purpose on a parked domain, they are usually misled and taken there believing there is some kind of content they want. Domainers need to learn to develop sites and stop parking pages, they are of no use.
I just switched to DNSAdvantage like Kevin did, and also found that no parked domains are blocked. Is it possible it was a browser plugin or an ISP that blocked it?
Some anti-virus, anti-spyware programs have anti-parking page programs.
It’s off-topic, but Happy DNSSEC Day – The Root Is Signed – PC Mag, June 16th, 2010. It’s historical. Verisign is supposed to sign the root for dot net by the 4th quarter this year, and dot com the first quarter of next year, 2011, which will force the sneaky impersonators to drop off – yay! Lots of domains will be offline. They ned to add a signature, after the main tld’s adopt signatures. Those fat slobs of Registrars who rely on spammer business is going to to see profits diminish – yay!
Hello Mike,
We all could see this one coming out of the side of our denial blinders. There is an ever increasing assault on parked page revenues. I am being a realist rather than being negative. I will say this as I have been for years. Until the powers that be have full control of parked domains, this trend will remain.
What will domainers do collectively to fight back? So far nothing. I have been trying to rally leaders in the domain industry with a strategy that would increase parked revenues and also promote direct navigation at the same time. Knowone has stepped up to the plate SO FAR. We have a solution. Will we collectively work together?, or will the every man for himself attitude prevail?
Gratefully,
Jeff
Andrew/Kevin
Anything is possible
Good to hear you had no issue.
Reached out to Ken for clarification waiting for a response
Certainly the link indicates the block page exists or existed
@ MHB – yes, someone is blocking it in his case which is a big problem. I’m curious who’s actually doing it so we make sure to throw the appropriate party under the bus 🙂
I hate parked pages. I think they degrade the experience of the Internet. Even so, I really don’t like what Neustar is doing.
Neustar is, in effect, acting as a censor. They decide what you should and shouldn’t see, and substitute their content instead. That is just hijacking the DNS. How would people feel if a private company (or government) decided to divert phone calls because they decided that the party you were trying to call was somehow unworthy?
The fact that the content they substitute is possibly even worse than a parked page is just an added irony. I’m not sure if it’s worse to do this for money or through some misguided attempt to “clean up” the Internet.
The real problem is that people don’t have any choice. Nowhere do they get to indicate that they would rather not see parked pages. If this were a new TLD that banned parked pages, then people could choose to use that TLD and avoid them. Equally, if they enjoyed them, they could choose to navigate to sites with a different TLD that allowed them. Or even a TLD that exclusively featured parked pages — not holding my breath for that one though.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a backlash, some movement for “DNS neutrality” or something similar, to prevent robbing people of the choice to see what they want to see — even if it is repulsive. After all, the big ISPs (Verizon, etc.) hijack 404 responses to do the same thing. Neustar just takes it to another level.
Antony
Antony
I agree but am concerned that both Andrew who I trust implicitly and a reader to the blog say that they are not getting this blocked page using DNSAdvantage although the link clearly has their logo and other info contained on the page.
I have reached out to Ken again and we will see what they have to say
Hmmm…perhaps what Ken saw was a test? DNSAdvantage clearly has plans to do this. From their description page “coming soon” (note “excessive advertising sites”)
Coming Soon We’ve teamed up with trusted third-party security experts to keep real-time block lists (RBL) of harmful websites (i.e. phishing sites, malware sites, spyware sites, excessive advertising sites, etc.). We will warn you when you attempt to access a site containing potentially threatening content based on the RBL that are updated daily. You can trust us to protect you and your customers from many of the known online dangers.
Andrew
Good catch.
Still no word from Ken maybe you can try
Sorry for the confusion, I realize now you’re talking about Ken from Neustar. I’ll see if I can get in touch with anyone.
@ MBH, May I ask you, are you okay with it, if DNS service blocks sites attempting to distribute malware? Personally, I don’t mind if malware-distributing sites are blocked from my access!
I have no problem with blocking malware of phishing as reported by users.
Andrew
I’m told someone from Neustar will be commenting on the blog shortly
Before Neustar gives their formal response to this blog post I would like to remark, I spearheaded the DNSAdvantage project from the get go about two and a half years ago.
I was a Director over at Neustar Ultra Services and know the internal working on this deal.
Before this existed we were a small company UltraDNS, we were acquired by Neustar and renamed “Neustar Ultra Services” unless they have changed it back. This division works separately from the big whigs over at Neustar Corporate and in fact in a completely different building, though we were down the hall from the registry guys. The Ultra division runs the external DNS piece for ALOT of the Internet, some of the companies being Amazon.com, Expedia.com, Hotels.com and more (you can run a whois on the name servers and see UltraDNS on there). Ultra already had a recursive service but no one took it very serious, it was overpriced and under utilized.
Long story short, internally ideas started flying around about using the recursive being used in unison with the external to provide a more “secure/faster DNS network”. I was brought in on meetings and we discussed potential partnerships with various parking platforms (whom I won’t mention).
The recursive network was propagated throughout the external piece, ISP’s could now have a global network of recursive servers, be on the same network with some of the largest Internet players, supply a black list functionality to block whatever they wanted from an interface and at the same time get rid of their own recursive servers.
That’s about all I care to share as a general overview of the situation for the audience, I will leave my opinions of them aside. Jason or Ultra if you care to discuss the phone is always on, maybe this time you’ll pick up your skirt and call.
@Troy @Jon
What you say can be argued one way or the other but surely if one is of the opinion that parked pages provide no value then there can be no possible justification for blocking parked pages with PPC ads and in turn serving up your own PPC ads instead.
Waiting to see if this behavior is in fact the case, if so it’s clearly anti-competitive and a conflict of interest.
Important Update
I chatted with Allen Goldberg VP of Neustar about the issue.
Here is the answer;
The page I referred to in the blog post does exist right now.
Whether you see it will depend on your ISP, which explains why some commentators like Andrew didn’t get a blocked page using dnsadvantage.
Neustar allows each ISP to select options how certain pages will be handled
For example an ISP might elect to block porn or block parked domains.
Its then the ISP choice what will appear on the blocked page, so if the ISP wanted Neustar to put up just a page saying the Parked domain is block, it will.
However the ISP has the option of having Neustar put up Neustars PPC ads on blocked page and share in the revenue.
So basically Neustar wants to kick the whole thing down the street to the ISP.
But my opinion from the original post is unchanged.
Its Neustar who owns the alternative DNS service who is given the option to the ISP to blocked parked domains and put up their own ads and share revenue with the ISP’s.
Neustar thereby is asking domainers to register domains of extension they are involved while creating the platform to block the domains once registered.
Nothing in my Conversation with Allen has changed my opinion on the situation.
I’m planning on meeting with other Neustar reps in Brussels.
Doesn’t the threat of TM infringement fall back on the domain owner even though he is using the domain properly?
(hypothetical)
BingEngines,com displaying motor engine parts links.
But, the ISP puts up links going to Bing search engine.
I assume the ISP and Neustar are held harmless.
antony has it right.
dns is not the proper way to block
– popups
– popunders
– malware
– sites you don’t like
– etc.
all this is easily handled on the application level.
regardless of whether you like “parked” pages or not (that is certainly a worthy issue to discuss, but it is not the issue here) if you see nothing wrong with what neustar is doing (and which others will be doing soon enough- because they all compete and copy each other), then you do not truly understand how your computer nor the internet works. because if you did, you would not see this as a “service” but as a means of diverting PPC ad income from the domain name owner to the dns administrator. that is the motivation. so it does not “stop” anything. it merely diverts the money to someone else. and undermines the integrity of so-called “dns service”.
use your own dns server and a hosts file.
you choose the sites you want to connect to and the content you want to access. if you’re serious about wanting only “content” why mess around?
i doubt there is an application in existence which connects to the internet which does not first check your own computer’s hosts database first *before* using dns. over the past 20+yrs why hasn’t someone rewritten gethostbyname and remove this behaviour? maybe because it works?
with all the memory and disk space people have these days, they could store on their computer every IP they’ll ever want to visit in their *lifetime*, easily.
dns is an option, not a requirement.
Coffee
I think that is a very interesting question.
What if the blocked landing page is serving up infringing results, is the owner of the domain liable? In a UDRP very likely, can the domain owner sue Neustar for service up ads? Interesting question, one I’m sure we will get the answer to one day
John
Giving ISP Blocking options is fine but giving them the right to block say porn sites and put up a youporn.com type site that is then owned jointly by Neustar and the ISP or PPC ads instead of the domain owners PPC ads is crossing the line and screwing their domain customers
MHB, Would you do this experiment? Look up, Applyfor.us using dnsadvantage – I set to parked page. Do you see the Moniker parked page? Will dnsadvantage favor .us and .biz?
Thanx!
Louise
I will ask them, but I think the answer is no, because its up to the ISP to make the call on blocking or not blocking parked domains. I don’t think the ISP get to choose what to do by extension.
Mike
The system redirects NX domains or domains that do not yet exist. It is strictly up to the ISP to delegate a block on any domains that currently exist (or at least it was when I left). In all truth the ISP could do this with or without DNSAdvantage but Neustar makes it quite easy for them, I don’t think they really thought out the implications of this as Neustar considers their pockets first.
To be honest I wouldn’t be too worried about this from Neustar…yet. They simply haven’t gained much market, there’s other companies that do this such as Paxfire.com who don’t even consider Neustar a competitor, they physically go to the ISP and give them their Paxfire recursive box instead, have a wider range of the market and have been doing this for a longer period of time. I think the only reason we’re hearing about Neustar is because they’re also in the TLD business.
Louise
DNSAdvantage does not favor any tld, again it is up to the ISP to put any safeguards on domains that exist.
Everyone is always banging on Neustar, can’t we talk about the good they do? What about the finance student who learned a lesson by saving money when he deleted his .us and .biz portfolio, or the cripple who broke out of his wheel chair to reach the computer so he could get rid of the .us and .biz extension from his godaddy account. =)
John
“”I think the only reason we’re hearing about Neustar is because they’re also in the TLD business””
Exactly
That’s the problem as I see it
On the topic of the benefits of Neustar:
1) Neustar leads in security. Verisign is lax on security
2) With ICANN’s passing last year of Verisign’s process of Bulk Transfer After Partial Portfolio Acquisition (BTAPPA) of dot com and dot net – a system Neustar implemented successfully in 2006 – it looks like massive takeover of unresolved dot coms and dot nets looming. Therefore dot us and dot biz may be good investment/development alternative. See rant, linked to above.
This is a great article. There is also the effect of service providers, like Comcast and AT&T, favoring sites with better speed, that they have deals and arrangements with. The FCC was ruled against, that it has the jurisdiction to regulate broadband, so it is trying to review its powers as to broadband internet to protect net neutrality, instead of service providers interfering with subscriber’s web traffic.
neustar should just replace “due to excessive advertising” with the truth. neustar wants to collect parking revenue (through partnership with dnsadvantage) without having to purchase the name, i.e. bear the cost of ownership i.e. they want the reward without without the risk.
if you are still in doubt that “due to excessive advertising” is a sham, consider this: does neustar block the site called milliondollarhomepage.com?
it’s 100% ads. no content. it earned the owner >$1MM in ad income.
there are easy ways to avoid PPC ads as an end-user. it’s simply a matter of learning. if one truly wants to curb advertising, then educating users is the proper path.
neustar is not helping users in that regard… they are still directing users to PPC, and taking a cut. perhaps we all need to simply admit that ads are (or are becoming) the most valued part of the web. and no one is about to help users learn how to avoid ads, and view only content. why is that? just be honest.
The good news is that DNSSEC should stop all of this nonsense. You won’t be able to serve ads for NX or domains that matter. More DNSSEC tools need to make it down to the clients as well, so end-users can see when this sort of thing is occuring (But also to allow bypassing DNSSEC blocking sites when it’s just that DNSSEC is broken somehow). Of course, this is no better in the end than users clicking “OK” or whatever will get rid of the warning fastest, as with SSL cert warnings and anything else, but at least the end-user is presented with information.