RE: GCI wildcarding

Scott Johnson wrote:
> Am I the only one seeing GCI DNS servers 209.165.131.12 & .13=20
> are returning wildcard results for non-existent domains? I=20
> keep getting 65.200.200.60 for any DNS record that isn't=20
> valid. Sigh.... has this been happening for a while and I=20
> just now noticed it? Connecting on port 80 returns a "My GCI"
> search results page filled with a bunch of advertising.
> ICANN called on VeriSign [
> http://www.icann.org/announcements/advisory-19sep03.htm] to=20
> end this practice when they implemented it on the root zone -=20
> why did GCI have to break things too?
> Man.....

Scott (et al) - I took the liberty of asking up the food chain,
and got this as a response that I could send back out:

8<---------------------------------------------------------->8
Scott,

 Yes, for those of us who have been on the Internet for awhile and
understand how all this stuff really works, yes, this type of thing is a
pain. However a majority of GCI's (and any service provider's) customers
aren't like us. I actually hear that the majority of the feedback they
have received is positive as people like getting pointed to where they
were intending to go instead of getting a browser error that they
usually don't know what to do with. A side benefit is that GCI gets
fewer tech support calls about "why the Internet isn't working". People
also apparently like not having to install browser toolbar add-ons to do
searches as they can just do them from the address bar now. This kind of
thing is becoming more and more prevalent on the Internet today on all
service provider's networks and I think the cat is out of the bag
already. It's probably also important to point out that you can still
get standard browser errors (if that is your liking) by selecting that
option on the opt-out page.

Thanks.
8<---------------------------------------------------------->8

Please note that I don't normally get in the middle of these
types of discussions, because, well, I don't like to get in
the middle of them.

FWIW, I run my own DNS server, so I don't see this. :-)
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Received on Mon Nov 19 09:28:28 2007