It wasn’t long ago that I wrote about OpenDns and how they were blocking parked domains pages from being served and was replacing them with their own page serving up ads for which they, not the domain owners were getting paid for.
Now the shoe is on the other foot as OpenDns is complaining about Verizon, which is now blocking OpenDNS ad pages and serving up Verizon’s ad pages.
This is a version of a Cookie war, call it a landing page war, where company is blocking one parked page in favor of their own parked page.
It’s fine and dandy when these companies take our traffic and replace it with there own pages and ads
When we complain about losing the cash, they have no sympathy .
However when it happens to them, they are complain.
The blocker got blocked
Here is my favorite quotes from the interview with OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch.
“””” What are ISPs doing today?
And they try to block us in crafty ways. There was a report of an ISP working group whose members said that for “security” reasons, they should block alternative DNS services.”””
Q: “”Why do you have a dog in this fight?
A: “We just want a level playing field. Verizon Wireless is blocking us and there are reports that ISPs want to block OpenDNS. They don’t want third party domain name services.
““Q: Why would they do this?
“A: “We have 20 million users, it’s free (for consumers) and we are making money. We serve search results and ads like Yahoo or Google to people who have opted in and chosen to use my service. So we monetize traffic that way. The ISPs see this as all this revenue they are leaving on the table that they believe belongs to them. I don’t know why they think so because it doesn’t belong to them.”
The traffic “doesn’t belong to them”
Priceless
Of course the traffic doesn’t belong to Verizon, but guess what boys, our traffic doesn’t belong to you either.
So now its OpenDNS that is complaining about their traffic being blocked and repla out blocking their blocker and taking the cash off the landing pages.
Mr. Ulevitch your starting to sound like a domainer.
Closest to the Consumer – The Browser (or Application) Vendor views the TRAFFIC as their traffic.
Microsoft recently priced one of their Massive Multi-Player Aps at 10 Cents down from $39.95 to attract EyeBalls.
Internet@TV is taking more and more eyeballs and traffic. Domainers likely don’t notice. Serious development is required to get close to a the consumer AP Store.
Along with the above, ICANN is planning to flood the domain name space with thousands of new players.
Let the games begin. WOW – World of Warcraft with Real People !!!
P-r-i-c-e-l-e-s-s!!! This read made Thanksgiving extra special.
Rogers hijacked my landing pages and the ads they show are not filtered. It sometimes shows adult ad links.
I turned it off after i saw these ads.
MHB,
Your blog post seems misleading.
1. OpenDNS is a service you can sign up for, it is not forced upon anyone, and you have the option to customize what to block.
2. On the other hand Verizon is violating the foundation of net neutrality, where the lack of net neutrality is more of a threat to the domaining industry.
3. We should be more upset at Verizon because what stops them from tomorrow blocking domain landing pages without cause.
4. It should be blogs like yourself leading the effort to push for net neutrality which is in favor of the domaining industry.
http://www.savetheinternet.com
ty
Mr. Doe
No one has to use Verizon either as their ISP.
The point is that NO one in the cycle of a surfer wanting to go to a site should wind up at something not controlled by the domain holder.
So in my book these 2 are the same, they are stealing traffic
“they are stealing traffic”
===
When “theDomains” is entered into Google, do THEY steal your traffic ?
When “theDomains” is entered into FireFox, do THEY bring you traffic ?
…even without the .COM
Could it be that the Simple (naive?) architecture of Domain–>IP Address–>WebSite no longer holds ?
Did the DNS become too widely used for the wrong applications ?
Did the DNS lock players out causing various games at the edge ?
OpenDNS received $4.5M in VC funding in September http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/30/opendns-funding so probably they’re a little sensitive about having their ‘Open Guide’ (error traffic page full of ads) blocked. I don’t think Ulevitch would take kindly to being called a domainer though. When I called out their use of the word ‘Open’ (for implying open software) in the Techcrunch comments, he dropped me a note…”Ironic a domainer would write that. your mother would be proud of you, I’m sure.”
CANT catch a Theif … With a NET?
There are secret board meetings daily with the elite few ,
to discuss NEW active traffic “Hot Spots” that are then shook-down silently.
With a military swiftness traffic is exploited for monetization
and then abandoned with out a trace for the next lucrative HOT PATH …
TILL next time!
“There are secret board meetings daily with the elite few…”
===
There are certainly things going on EACH DAY, even Holidays
…
Some of those events impact Domainers
…
Most Domainers choose to not believe what is being planned and prefer to live in some blissful state of denial- Comparisons to the banking industry and sub-prime lending and cash-out refinancing assuming inflation show similar patterns.
…
Recent SEC revelations on Insider Trading show that some people do not have inside information, they just have a superior grasp of repeating patterns that human greed follows
…
“the elite few” or maybe few dozen continue to do as they please and always have
Very interesting post.
I also hate to see ISPs or DNS services re-direct traffic where they wish. I think the end-user should be allowed to go to any domain name, whatever is behind it.
This being said, it seems to me the best leverage a domain name owner has is to develop the domain to the point where the ISP/DNS service cannot afford to not direct the traffic to it. They would not want to be known as the ISP that does not let you visit say estibot.com or whatever site you might have.
Another idea would be to document on a website the list of “censorship” cases as a way for domainers and internet users to gather evidence on “bad behaviour”.
InternetCensors.com ?
@ Landon White, what you said makes sense. I agree. First of all, Verisign sells insider info on hot topics to Registrars right on its site:
Domain Name Intelligence for Domain Names and Renewals
http://www.verisign.com/domain-name-services/current-registrars/internet-profile-service
which Verisign – as a monopoly Registry of dot com – is privy to. It has a good business/racket going on.
Simple-minded, smart-as-a-2nd-grader me picked up the passing of Verisign’s policy of Bulk Transfer After Partial Portfolio Acquistion of dot com and dot net, which will allow Registrars to buy, sell and trade sponsorships of desirable domain names among themselves. You could wind up at a Registrar not of your choosing. More info on linked above. You agreed to this, since participating Registrars added terms to their terms to enable this, to escape liability:
Netsol Terms, Schedule A, Section 12
“You acknowledge and agree that pursuant to applicable policies adopted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) related to the transfer of domain names it is possible for your domain name to be transferred to another registrar even though the transfer has not actually been approved by you . . . we . . . shall not be liable to you for the actions of third parties, including but not limited to registry operators, in connection with a domain name transfer, or a reversal of or refusal to reverse a domain name transfer, whether or not the transfer was approved by you.”
This is new since ICANN’s passing of Verisign’s BTAPPA. Noone is speaking out about it, except me: http://www.icannwatch.org/articles/09/10/22/1927236.shtml Since Verisign’s BTAPPA got passed in July 2009, Verisign stock gained to 94%. I told my Dad to buy Verisign stock – I KNEW it was going up!
MHB,
I am trying to see your way, but still disagree with your last comment.
1. “No one has to use Verizon either as their ISP.”
Unfortunately where I live Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast are not available for me. So there are situations where only one ISP provider might be available. However, the point you make that Verizon in most areas is an opt in option makes sense, but lets keep in mind that they are practically an oligopoly limiting your choices.
2. “The point is that NO one in the cycle of a surfer wanting to go to a site should wind up at something not controlled by the domain holder.”
That is kind of like saying that pop blockers are wrong because if there is a legitimate pop up from a domain holder, I should be forced to see it.
For argument sake, lets say I am opt in to use OpenDNS to block all pornographic, malware, and ad landing pages. When I enter a URL on my computer and not the domain holders, the url is being filtered to the point that it is never technically hitting the original URL on the internet. Thus the domain holder technically has no rights on my computer because I am choosing to have that filter in place without ever actually going to your domain property. It is my own personal choice of freedom, which is also one of the thriving principle foundations of this country.
3. Regardless, lets put everything above aside, Verizon today is taking away legitimate traffic from OpenDNS when it is suppose to act as a neutral gate keeper. What stops them from stealing ad landing pages tomorrow.
The bottom line is that when it comes down to it, which one is a bigger threat to the domaining industry. The answer in my book is Verizon!
If we agree on this last point if nothing else, then please help support net neutrality by adding the link below to your recommended list and touting it every once in a blue moon when you tout ICA.
http://www.savetheinternet.com
PS. Love your blog, keep up the good work … 🙂
John
Even if you live in a rural community you should be able to get hughesnet.com which is sat service or a cell connection
In any event it doesn’t matter.
I’m a simply guy and if I want to go to a landing page or an adult page or wherever I want to navigate to I reach something else because my ISP or the DNS service I’m using is hijacking the traffic, I’m not going to be a happy guy.
I like OpenDNS. I like that they block crappy sites. They are doing my bidding and there’s no reason for you to complain about it.
Net neutrality should be a sacred principle in this country. If I want to filter my traffic, fine. If Verizon wants to, they should be punished. My choice of enforcer is the US government.
John Doe
“For argument sake, lets say I am opt in to use OpenDNS to block all pornographic, malware, and ad landing pages.”
But OpenDNS doesn’t block ad landing pages- they provide them! That’s what we’re talking about. When you misspell a url in your address bar OpenDNS hijacks your error and delivers you to THEIR ad landing page. You never see a 404. If they gave you an opt out it would be one thing, but they don’t, it’s their entire business model!
i find this issue one of the most amusing in the realm of inet politics. it comes down to “spin” (call it “FUD” if you want). opendns has gone pretty heavy on the spin since their debut. and they use it to target competitors. e.g. trying to make google seem like “the bad guy” after google started their own dns service. or here, trying to make isp’s seem like the ones who are “doing wrong”. unfortunately for the competitors, they have other areas (more closely related to their core business) that they have to manage and sometimes their actions in these other areas can “make them look bad”. e.g., privacy or bandwidth issues, respectively. and perhaps their shaky reputations in these other areas could give opendns some “leverage” for their spin campaigns. as opendns’ core business is something few users care about (dns), opendns to the uninformed user might seem more or less “harmless”.
i mean what’s the worst they do? hehe. if users only knew.
opendns is every bit as “greedy” as any of their competitors in terms of selling ad space, and they seem equally as intent on gathering quasi-personal information from users for commercial purposes. e.g. they want to geolocation info about their customers, after which they would no doubt claim their ad space is more valuable. because so few users care about dns (beyond just speed and reliability), opendns perhaps gets less scrutiny.
everyone is after these ad dollars, whether it’s the browser maker (e.g. mozilla), the isp (verizon, etc), the dns provider (google, neustar, opendns, etc.), or the domain owner.
it’s all very amusing. the spin, the FUD. but i sometimes wonder, does anyone really care besides the companies themselves? (and people like us reading about this stuff?)
on a somewhat unrelated note, i am simply amazed at how much mozilla and their partners have configured the firefox browser to “phone home”. i run from cdrom a lot on machines with no hard disk
and the network interface is off unless i need to turn it on. so it’s painfully obvious when an application is “waking up” without any input and even more obvious when it’s trying to “phone home”.
this browser, with all it’s noncommercially flavoured hype (baffling since their developers are hardly underpaid and they have some very commercial partners and many millions on annual revenue), it just keeps “waking up” and phoning home if you leave it open. it’s crazy- this is the antithesis of privacy. it has no need to do that- but be assured mozilla would have arguments why it’s “good for everyone”. when i consider the enormous user base of a browser like mozilla, the sheer quantity of data collection from that default behaviour, on such a massive scale of users, just boggles my mind. now _that_ is one mighty data set. how many people leave their browser open and their internet connection “on” all day or night? i’d guess a very large percentage, perhaps over 90%.
maybe this is my own brand of FUD. (hey it’s just information they’re getting, right?). but then i stand nothing to gain monetarily from documenting this, while these companies stand everything to gain from the spin they propagate, and as this blog entry points out, their brand of it is often hilarious.
a couple of other thoughts
1. the isp is providing an _essential_ service: connectivity. dns is an _optional_ service. i don’t need to use a domain name to connect to a webserver. i can do it with a number (and if necessary the virtual hostname). in the tlephone world, we all store names and phone numbers. inet names and numbers are, in this respect, no different. even if the user wants to use dns, she can run her own stub resolver. she doesn’t need a dns service provider. in so many words, the interviewee in the washington post article admits his “open” dns relies as much on type-in navigation as any domainer. (see comment about chrome)
2. the whole paradigm of “blocking”, “filtering”, etc. and now even as a useful “service”, in the form of an intercepting dns provider is, imo, backwards. the paradigm that makes more sense is one where the user chooses what she wants, not what she doesn’t want. in either case, of course, she may not know. but the dynamic we see over an over with programmers is that they believe they should give users “everything”, the “maximum” (data, features, options, storage space, etc.) and let them sort through it. this of course hardly works well because users have neither the time, understanding nor the inclination to sort through it all. alas, rarely is the user given only the minimum and instructed how, if desired, to further investigate so as to learn what more she might want. this approach would do much in conserving resources not to mention keeping things simple.
rather than let someone else block sites en masse, users should be adequately instructed and enabled to only retrieve and store the internet number and name info they need. users can keep their own personal (and private) caches of this information.
in the telephone world, we tend to obtain and use for ourselves personal copies of the telephone directories, not shared ones. nor do we dial directory assistance for each and every number we need to look up. with the internet it should be no different.
of course none of this will ever happen. there’s money in domain names, whether owning them (by redirecting to ads), selling them or blocking them (by redirecting to ads). the pot and the kettle will continue to try to differentiate themselves, ethically. they are after the same bounty and rely on the same bizarre phenomenon: the typed domain name.
PcMag has now also “independently” picked up on this story
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373506,00.asp
John Humphrey,
I understand your position, but I still disagree with it.
I come back to Open DNS is an opt in service, so I am choosing to view their ad landing pages by choice because I opt in to use their free service. They also offer a paid version that offers features that are customizable.
Verzion on the other hand is suppose to act as a neutral gate keeper, instead it is taking away legitimate traffic away from OpenDNS. What stops Verizon them from stealing all ad landing pages tomorrow.
Thus in my book, Verizon is a bigger threat to the domaining industry.
The Solution: http://www.savetheinternet.com
P.S. Glad to see that PC Mag picked it up …
decentralise the DNS query process and ISP blocking becomes infeasible.
choosing OpenDNS’s cache over your ISP’s, or vice versa, might be viewed as the lesser of two evils. why even use someone’s else’s cache, when you can use your own?
does every user have to query the same server, or two? no.
why do they do it then?
speed? reliability?
well, no alternative is faster nor more reliable than your own cache. caches, even enormous ones, can be built and rebuilt very quickly. (the dns providers know this, so should you)
this is fact. the experiments can be replicated.
do you need the entire internet namespace (or a neutrality-violating, filtered one) in your cache? do you need the domain choices of 10’s, 100’s, 1000’s, 100’s of 1000’s of other unknown internet users? unless you are accessing 100’s or 1000’s of domains a day, imo, no. you only need your choices.
so the point is that you could put yourself in control, instead someone you don’t know who contractually owes you nothing (as is generally true with any free service).
“the catch” is you have to learn how DNS works. the only reason i can see why anyone uses a “DNS service” is because they do not fully understand how DNS works, how fast and how truly simple it is. if they did, i think they would surely “service themselves”.
but, i guess that’s true of so many things in IT.
pay no mind. same old story. carry on.
I would love to be able to control my own DNS. And probably there’s a 14 year old kid out there right now figuring out how to build a truly ‘open’ as in open software, DNS. OpenDNS is welcome to do whatever and however they choose, my beef has always been that they call themselves Open, but they’re not.
This is ancillary but interesting: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/29/peter-sunde-seconds-the-idea-of-an-alternative-root-dns/
the “root” is an approx. 300-line text file.
it does not change very often.
anyone can keep a copy of it on their computer.
moreover, in practice, you rarely need to use “the root”.
(so why does it get accessed so much? no one knows… but the strongest theories are based around developer or administrator ignorance.)
only a few of those lines in that short text file are what most users routinely need, namely the entries for .com, .net and .org.
the “root” is not nearly as important as many people describe it to be. massive FUD.
the .com servers are the ones that really matter.
but again, anyone can get a copy of the info the .com servers serve up. it is every user’s right to request it.
so you see, these servers themselves are not so important. when i hear about the “ceremonies” they hold to protect these computers, with all the the cryptography they can muster, as if the world depended on them, i almost burst out laughing.
anyone can store their own copies of the info these computers serve up. it’s the digital equivalent of the telephone book.
it’s not the info, or the servers, that need to be protected, it’s the transparency and integrity of the process of updating the info. and it all comes down to the people working at verisign. no amount of cryptography can protect against an ethically challenged human in a position of trust.
but the security FUD will just keep coming…
JH: DNS software is almost all “open source”. And the few “proprietary” offerings are in all cases based on the open sourced ones. DNS software is not complex. It’s just extremely tedious. The reason I believe why almost no one touches it is because it’s tedious, and, I surmise, because many people think it’s boring.
The main reason it’s tedious is because most systems administrators don’t understand how to configure DNS (it’s probably boring to them as well, and that may contribute to their apathy), so DNS software developers are expected to account for every possible nonsensical DNS configuration.
No 14-old whiz kid is going to waste his time playing with DNS. It’s too simple, and too boring.
Code monkeys coming of age are renown for using their skills to reimplement old software, in vain attempts to improve it or many times not knowing it already exists. But history shows DNS is one area that few of them will ever delve into.
The “complexity” many perceive in DNS comes from the bizarre, unpredictable behaviour of its administrators and its users, not the software.
Any “complexity” in DNS software is added by _developers_, either as a legitimate response to the aforementioned behaviour or, “illegitmately”**, for reasons only they will ever know.
**Disclaimer: I’m biased against unnecessarily complex software.
Overall DNS is a simple system. And if all the world’s software written to date is any indication, most software developers are not engaged by simple systems, such as DNS. They are more intrigued by complexity, and will actively seek out or fabricate increasingly more complex problems to work on.
to clarify- the root.zone as published at internic is not 310 lines. it has a hefty amount of nonessential fluff. it can be reduced to 310 essential lines, which easily fits in a script or compiled program, each line containing a tld extension and the IP number for its NS. (and one don’t need digital signatures for every entry in the file, aka DNSSEC, if one is storing a local copy of the file for themselves.)
i’ve discovered there are actually people with blogs *devoted to tld issues* who believe, e.g., that the root.zone is not a public file, and that one needs to have “connections” to the right people at icann to get a copy of it. this is the sort of ignorance that keeps the icann troupe in demand.
the only “connections” one needs to get a copy of those 310 NS IP numbers is an internet connection. one could use ftp, http or even udp to get the needed numbers.
there’s nothing complex or protected about “the root”. it comprises a small text file of public information. and it changes very infrequently.