ISP Hijacks Google Homepage

Controversy is brewing over a Canadian ISP inserting customer messages at the top Google's homepage, brought to you by Yahoo.

Well, Yahoo's not an official sponsor, but the message was co-branded with a Rogers Internet message warning customers nearing their monthly bandwidth limit.

Los Angeles-based technology consultant and Network Neutrality advocate
Weinstein writes, "While Rogers' current planned use for this Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and modification system…is for account status messages, it's obvious that commercial ISP content and ads (beyond the ISP logos already displayed) would be trivial to introduce through this mechanism."

Rogers justified the program by saying it was just a way for customers to keep track of their usage, and noted that there was no interference with the search. They also denied there was any "deep package" inspection going on, or that there were any privacy issues.

Mike Masnick relates how inserting corporate messages violates an unwritten contract where customers expect their ISPs to remain unobtrusive "dumb pipes."

"[ISPs] feel that they are more important than the content and services you are using. This is what leads to all those network neutrality debates, where the ISPs forget that they're providing just a pipe and think that they are the most important part of the process and have the right to change how everything else works. "

Masnick doesn't believe this is justification for Network Neutrality legislation, but
Canadian blogger
Google hasn't yet responded to request for comment regarding Rogers' modification of its homepage, but Google's webspam head