In what appears to be a violation of Net Neutrality by Rogers Cable, Digital Home readers are reporting that Rogers High Speed Internet service has begun redirecting customers “Server not found pages” to webpages laden with Rogers advertising.
The hijacking of the webpage appears to be attempt by Rogers to use its Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to cash in on the mistakes of its users.The “Cannot Find Server” web page is typically shown to a user when they type in a web address that does not exist. The purpose of the page is to inform the user that the web site does not exist or a lookup error has occurred so a correction can be made.
Using DPI technology, Rogers inspects the web address request and if it determines that a web surfer has mistakenly entered an invalid web address, Rogers redirects the request and serves up an ad laden webpage selling Rogers products and services rather than allowing the informative “Cannot find server” web page to be displayed.
The result is a confused web browser who has no idea why his or her browser has been hijacked and is now on a Rogers search page.
Example of the Net Neutrality Violation
In order to understand what is happening, consider the following example. Suppose a user typed the following url “www.rogersviolatingnetneutrality.com” into their browser. Since no such website yet exists, Internet Explorer or any other web browser would display a page that looked like this.
The page states the page the user requested cannot be displayed and provides some suggestions on how to resolve the issue.As of today, Rogers customers typing in the url “www.rogersviolatingnetneutrality.com” into Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer will receive a page that looks like this.
This practice is in violation of the tenets of net neutrality because proponents of net neutrality believe that Internet Service Providers (ISP) should not be allowed to be the gatekeepers of the internet and must not interfere with the content requested by users (especially error pages which provide users with information on why the page did not properly display) Link