ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) on Tuesday condemned the practice of redirecting Internet users to a third-party portal when they mistype, or enter a nonexistent URL. You'll recall that the practice gained international attention when Verisign implemented their heavily-loathed Sitefinder initiative in 2003. That effort pushed ad-laden portals instead of proper errors Internet wide, but Verisign was forced to shutter the idea after significant backlash and ICANN criticism.

ICANN published its opinions and findings in a draft memo, which discourages the practice of redirecting requests for nonexistent domains across all network levels, and suggests possibly even a ban of the practice, at least among gTLD owners. The Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) has long opposed such efforts, calling it a "destabilizing practice."Since Verisign's NXDOMAIN substitution effort, ISPs have widely been deploying redirection tools of their own and the tactic, dubbed DNS redirection, has grown to be an industry standard. While it's pushed by ISPs as something helpful, the concept's entire purpose is to create a revenue stream out of your sloppy typing. While ISPs don't reveal hard numbers, insiders have told us that DNS redirection can net an ISP an additional $5 in revenue, per user, per month.

Early on (2006), 'net purists lambasted the practice for the way it broke core network functionality. ISPs didn't help their cause by deploying the "service" without functional opt-out mechanisms. More recently, companies like Comcast have done a better job deploying the service, by offering customers "clean" DNS servers, engaging in an open dialog with users about what they want, and transparently documenting the effort via the RFC process.