A few days ago, after installing Fedora 14 into my netbook I noticed a peculiar problem with my internet service. When I punched the URL of my school into the address bar of firefox I found myself instead on a search page, littered with text and graphical adds pertaining to college. The adds were mostly for loans, or online schools, none of which were interesting to me. The interesting part was how I got to this page. At the top of the page next to the logo of my ISP, Windstream, was a heading that read: “Sorry ‘northgeorgia.edu’ does not exist or is not available.” I scratched my head, as obviously the first option was not the case, and the second option is almost as improbable as me winning the lottery.

My schools site was not down, so how did I get onto this search page? I figured I had misspelled the URL and retyped it into my the address bar… another search page! After a few more attempts, and some page refreshing, I restarted my browser. That fixed the problem, for the time being it was just an annoyance. I was not surprised when Facebook came up with the same add page and message later that day, that site seems to be down a lot lately.

Is this Ethical?
A day or two later I found myself researching gas companies, Its getting a little cold and I want a good price for this winters heating so I started by googling a few local companies. It turns out the natural gas industry, and its pricing, is comparable to American cellphone service providers. Prices are high, and each company has a slew of different packages, variable and fixed prices, and of course the required credit check. After all my research, the decision basically came down to some word of mouth suggestions. I punched the URL of my chosen company into the address bar. It was pretty easy to remember, and I had been researching for at least an hour, I knew all the local gas company URLs pretty well.

You may have already guessed, I did not get where I wanted to go, instead after trying to get directly to a major company I ended up at Bing. I was not to happy about this, especially when a refresh brought me to another add laden page. This time, every add was for a different natural gas company than the one I had tried to reach! I had suspected my ISP before, but now if they were the ones behind this they had just about cross the line. Seriously, this is the equivilant of standing in front of the doors to a brick and mortar shop, saying its not open, and offering to drive the prospective customer to another location where they can do business. I am not the victim here, obviously I am aware of how things move around the internet I know the difference between a 404 error, and a redirected add page, but my Grandparents don’t. They also use Windstream (there is no other broadband company in North Georgia) but are not adept at differentiating between adds and links.

Of course, anyone who knows how internet adds work, can see this a great opportunity for Windstream to increase their revenue, but at what cost to us? I was not a happy customer, I don’t pay my ISP so that they can shovel adds in my face when I’m trying to do my homework, I don’t pay my ISP so that they can make the choice of which company I want to frequent. I pay, a lot of money, so that I can move freely and unfettered across the internet.

What can you DO?
I decided to give them a call, and ask them to stop, turn off, or discontinue the DNS redirect they were subjecting me to. After navigating through the half dozen touchtone prompt menus and a few minutes on hold I finally reached a live person. I can usually expect someone with little to no networking knowledge on tier 1, and this call was no exception. I explained the situation, and the duress it was causing me. Windstream’s customer service representative flat out lied to me, and told me their company did not redirect customers to add screens, they followed that with an accusation, and play on their customers general insecurity and lack of knowledge by telling me I must have some sort of virus or malware on my computer and offered to sell me anti-virus software. I tried to explain to them that I was a linux user, and had just freshly installed a new distribution to my computer, meaning there is zero chance of malware on my end. That explanation pretty ended the phone call, as the customer service representative declared there was nothing they could do for me then promptly disconnected the call.

I shrugged their rude, accusations and continued on with my day. I keep pretty busy and don’t have the time to convince the entire 1st tier of Windstream’s poorly trained tech support that I know what Im talking about. I was also a little worried, as their irrational malware accusation had cast a shadow of doubt on some pretty large, and trusted, organizations. If I did have malware on my computer it would have had to be included from within my linux distribution, that was a scary thought I didn’t want to consider. I my mind Windstream’s representative had all but slandered the hard work of thousands of community volunteers, by planting that seed of doubt in my mind, where could I have downloaded malware? the only thing I had added to my computer from the internet was opensource repositories from forge.mil, was the government redirecting my DNS calls? As absurd as that may sound, and it is absurd, the thought actually crossed my mind. (It may not be a bad idea to increase gov revenue instead of hiking taxes…)
Twitter Rant ON

After that call I jumped on twitter, and started ranting @Windstream, I was livid. After a few tweets, I received a reply from Windstream via twitter saying It could be fixed. At least a little glad that Windstream was actually redirecting me (and not the government or hackers) I went along with my busy day and almost forgot about the entire incident. That is until two days later, when Windstream’s haywire ‘SearchAssist’ rerouted a call for ‘www.google.com’ as a search on Bing.com for ‘Google.’ I didn’t think computers had a sense of humor, but sure enough, in all of its glorious irony the error header reads: “We are Sorry. We could not find the site “www.google.com” SearchAssist recommends bing.com or google.com”

Last Call
I threw almost three hours of my day calling Windstreams Customer Service. At the begining of each call every representative told me Windstream did not redirect to adds. Despite offering the information that I use linux, and or OSX, two of those representatives asked me to “click on the start button,” and decided they could no longer help me after I explained I did not have a start button. In their defense they have probably never seen anything other than windows. I finally found some good research and some decent explanations to change the DNS direction in order to avoid those redirects. I also managed to convince a Tier 1 representative to forward me to Tier 2, where they were able to guide me through changing my modem settings. Finally I can see timeout pages and connection error pages the way they were meant to be seen, without adds (that redirect to adds when you refresh.) It should not have been that complicated, but I am glad its over.
rant