DNS Redirects – Are They Stealing Your Traffic?

Recently, I’ve experienced Time Warner Cable redirecting me to a page with their sponsored links on it whenever I don’t use the www when typing a domain name into the address bar or I do a misspelling or typo.

I have not chosen Time Warner’s search page as a preference. I have Google as my preference. Time Warner redirects me to their page anyway.

You have to go into preferences and “opt out” of this redirect in order to stop it from happening. Opting me in without my permission is unacceptable. On the web, you are supposed to ask peopkle to opt in, not add them without permission, then make them opt-out of a service. It’s a sleazy tactic to do otherwise.

Since I’ve had Timne Warner for 3 months and it did not start happening until this month, it means that when I signed up for the service, no one asked me to “opt-in”. It was not part of the service I ordered. They recently added it and they assume it is okay to add everyone to their new money-making scheme.

They are over-riding people’s search preferences so they can send you to a page with sponsored links so they can make money from the clicks on those links. Since, sometimes, simply not typing the www before a domain name, Time Warner redirects that to their sponsored links, it is the equivalent of stealing traffic from the website that the person who did the typing intended to go to.

Kazaa got in trouble in the past for amending affiliate urls by replacing the affiliate code on the link with their own and of course they claimed they did that unintentionally. I’m sure Time Warner will claim that their little traffic-stealing scheme was meant to help all of us poor users in case we type something wrong.

They will say it’s a service and they just want to help us out. We already have our default search settings configured and we get plenty of help without Time Warner trying to steal a few clicks on their sponsored ads.

I pay Time Warner for my Internet Service. I own a website and once when typing the address to my own website without the www, Time Warner redirected it to their sponsored links page where a user could have chosen someone else to visit instead of my website. They intercepted ttraffic meant for my site to sell it to someone else.

Is that stealing? You tell me.