The Five Levels of ISP Evil
corp.sonic.net
corp.sonic.net
The author of the "Five Levels" article is the CEO of Sonic.
ISP does not even have to be "deliberately" evil to underinvest in their network and oversell their capacity. Measure your latencies and actual bandwidth throughput and often you might smell a rat. This is not even necessarily by malicious intent, the infrastructure of ISPs could be sufficiently complex that some subtle mis-configuration somewhere in the upstream router could kill your performance for certain operations.
ISPs act as Internet gatekeepers and have enormous power over its clients/users. With this great power should come great responsibility.
This is a list of privacy issues, not incompetence.
Most people don't care about these things - it's evil because it is done by stealth.
Does anyone know if they are thinking of expanding their range?
As for the correct thing being to return NXDOMAIN, browsers could have started providing helpful error pages for NXDOMAIN, perhaps with searches, years ago. They didn't, so ISPs provided a useful service, which happens to conflict with a 13 year old RFC.
Certainly though, the big evil is handing over customer data without fighting or even so much as a warrant.
You're right about the RFCs and I think I made my point badly: I'm not saying ISPs should interpret them any way they like, I'm saying that they deal with a commercial reality and real end-users who just want things to work, and that sometimes the best is the enemy of the good.
In reality, a technically incorrect DNS server can easily work better (help them get their stuff done) for a naive user than a conforming one. Believing anything else is just geek self-delusion.
The right way to solve this is to improve browsers so that NXDOMAIN causes them to show a search page—which is exactly what they have started doing, so hopefully ISPs will stop doing this in future.
Specifically, whereas formerly the TCP protocol was a request for a connection between two computers, I am now going to interpret the four byte destination address as follows:
"Customer provides this information to us for use as we see fit. We may, if we so choose, route the packets to this address, or we may choose to route it somewhere else, including our own servers, or to a Value Added provider of our choice."
After all, consumers don't know about TCP do they? So its quite alright to define TCP as whatever the fuck we want, and therefore do, entirely legally, whatever we want with that "communication". Right? There's relatively little wrong with that right? I'm sure Google does a better job of search than your little start-up, so its in the customers best interest.
Same for all telephony traffic too. If we want to route it via the local gestapo we don't need a wiretap warrant for that: we just interpret RFC 3261 (Session Initiation Protocol) our own way. After all, who says these bytes arriving at our router have any meaning at all?