Reese Richman LLP, a New York Law Firm claims that there are many ISPs(Internet service providers) which are on purpose hijacking search queries. This act is being taken up to increase the count of affiliate dollars. Reese even has a lawsuit filed against RCN, a Virginia-based ISP and Paxfire, accused of being involved in such hijacking technologies. This lawsuit was filed on 4th August.
Reese even explains the working of the hijacking racket. He said that Paxfire has not only developed but even patented a hijacking technology which would give access to local Internet service providers for controlling the search queries of a user. This is done when a user targets a specific term. After the term is entered, these ISPs do not connect normally, but route the query to a site which is related to the term entered. The reason being that the related site is basically an associated link which relates to the query entered by a user.
The search engine giant, Google has already taken up preventive steps when it noticed such affiliation system. Google’s preventive method was effective enough to get back the status back to normal for the users. New Scientist reported, “The ISPs are understood to have stopped redirecting Google search traffic after the company complained to them earlier this year.”
An example quoted was of “Bloomingdales”. If a user enters a search query for “Bloomingdales,” then he would be redirected to Bloomingdales’ website. The benefit ISPs get out of it is simply a kick-back affiliated for any such purchase done on the website. International Computer Science Institutes’s Christian Kreibich and Nicholas Weaver have compiled evidence which relates to the matter. The compilation states that the number of redirected terms are more than 165. The query list includes mostly those queries which are related to brands. The major ISPs detected for such actions are XO Communication, Wide Open West, RCN, Paetec, Megapath, Insight Broadband, IBBS, Hughes, Frontier, Cogent, Cincinnati Bell and Cavalier.
This system adopted for hijacking is one brilliant monetization system. But Peter Eckersley even says “a deep violation of users’ trust and expectations about how the Internet is supposed to function.” In addition, as per the case of Reese, the system violates many statutes on the legal front. These acts cannot be termed as being majorly harmful for the users, but looking at the site owners prospective it is highly a matter of concern.
Eckersley is a part of the foundation, EFF which has worked on the development of an add-on for Firefox which can prevent users from being hijacked to an affiliate site by the local ISPs. The add-on is named HTTPS Everywhere and it turns each and every website to function as HTTPS. This would this prevent redirections which are unannounced.
Yahoo and Bing have not yet adopted any preventive steps which still leaves their users vulnerable of these illegal redirections without being warned with terms for such redirections. It is however not an easy task to as they would first have to recognize the queries which are attacked by such ISPs and accomplishing this task is really a hassle. Next problem is that if they have been sniffed, they might shift over to many other companies like Paxfire.