Behold the benevolence of Comast. The ISP giant has rolled out a service it calls helpful and critics call typosquatting.
The company said that its new Domain Helper service provides faster redirects when Web users mistype a domain address. With the new service, instead of getting a pesky error message, customers are redirected to "an easy-to-use page with suggestions and links to get you back on track."
The "seamless search experience" on the redirected page is "powered" by Yahoo. However, Comcast neglected to mention that the redirected page is actually ad-supported, a practice that did not slip the notice of customers.
Comcast customers were unsurprisingly outraged and called the service "sleazy," "shady," and "deceptive."
"You're not trying to introduce something 'new' to 'help' your customers," one poster wrote on Comcast's blog site. "You're trying to introduce something new to help your bottom line. You already charge $43 a month, and are a monopoly in most of the areas that you operate in. What else do you want?"
Comcast community blogger Scott McNulty defended the Domain Helper service.
"It is true that Domain Helper serves up ads, but you are ignoring the fact that it also performs a Yahoo search on the mistyped domain string entered," he wrote. "So if you're trying to get to Amazon.com and you mistype the URL ,a search is performed and chances are that Amazon.com will be the first result."
Comcast customers also said that Domain Helper was an example of "typosquatting." The illegal practice preys on those who misspell or otherwise incorrectly type in domain names and takes them to other sites in an effort to snag traffic and revenue.
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