Earthlink Tries a Site Finder of Its Own

A few years ago Verisign upset many on the Internet with Site Finder, a service that re-directed requests for non-existent domains to a Verisign portal. Now Earthlink seems to be upsetting some of its customers with a similar wildcard DNS record it calls its "dead domain" handling system. "Earthlink has fiddled with its DNS servers so they now return invalid results in an effort to funnel users to a portal," a r

A few years ago Verisign upset many on the Internet with Site Finder, a service that re-directed requests for non-existent domains to a Verisign portal. Now Earthlink seems to be upsetting some of its customers with a similar wildcard DNS record it calls its "dead domain" handling system.

"Earthlink has fiddled with its DNS servers so they now return invalid results in an effort to funnel users to a portal," a reader wrote. "Instead of returning the required 'NXDOMAIN' error on an attempt to look up a non-existent domain, they return the IP address of a portal website run by an Earthlink partner company. The portal website tries to guess the correct URL and presents you with a link, and -- surprise -- has advertisements, sponsored links (I assume) and a search engine."

For example, an Earthlink user trying to get to my site who types "gripe3ed" by mistake would find themselves on an Earthlink page with a link to my site and several other possibles. Now, that might not seem like such a bad thing for the average user, who would just as soon as have a link to the correct URL as a website-not-found error message. But, as Verisign discovered two years ago, any unexpected DNS behavior drives network administrators crazy. And Earthlink appears to be getting an earful about it from some of its customers.

"Earthlink operates a blog where they have entries touting this new 'feature' -- and scads of comments left by angry users telling Earthlink how it is causing them problems," the reader wrote. "The users are asking for the service to be turned off or at least to be made optional. But despite an overwhelmingly negative response from customers, Earthlink has not turned off the service."

For the time being it appears Earthlink plans to continue phasing in its dead domain handling system with modifications to address user complaints, but the reader is concerned about Earthlink's whole approach in introducing the system. "Clearly the people at Earthlink who authorized this abomination do not
understand how the Internet works, that Internet is not the same as World Wide Web and there is more to it than clicks on web links and referral income," the reader wrote. "The non-standard behavior causes problems for other internet applications, or even just for web browsers that try to help the user with non-existent domains. 2) The new DNS service provided did not always resolve domains that do exist, and Earthlink did not even inform their own customer service organization of the change."

And if Earthlink continues, won't other ISPs and perhaps even Verisign again get into the act with their own portals for mistyped URLs? "As an Earthlink customer, I am concerned that I am not getting standard compliant Internet service," the reader wrote. "And I'm definitely worried about marketing-driven/standards-breaking practices spreading to other ISPs, with Verisign and the root DNS servers being the worst case. Actually that's not the worst case as it is a single point and is easy to work around -- dozens of exceptions to standard DNS from different ISPs is even worse. The Internet depends on the underlying standards for basic operation and to provide a level playing field. In that sense, this could be interpreted as a net-neutrality issue."

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