Rogers Alters Web Page Content – WTF?

Will the stupidity of Canadian ISP’s never end?

I was surfing Digital Home Canada today and found this story about Rogers Altering Web Page Content. Basically, what Rogers is doing is “injecting” it’s content onto pages that you surf to, which in effect alters the pages in question to some degree. Rogers is basically forcing customers to view content they haven’t asked for while surfing on other peoples’ websites. Hugh Thompson the publisher of Digital Home Canada had a conversation with Rogers about this, and he posted the response today. Basically, Rogers doesn’t think it did anything wrong.

Of course others besides Hugh Thompson disagree of course. Rogers was experimenting with this a while back and it caught the attention of Wired last December, sparking a huge debate about net neutrality at the time, and even getting attention of Google:

“As a general principle, we believe that maintaining the Internet as a neutral platform means that carriers shouldn’t be able to interfere with Web content without users’ permission,” the Google statement said. “We are in the process of contacting the relevant parties to bring this to a quick resolution.”

Rogers response to Google seems to be something along the lines of FOAD given the fact that they’re still doing it.

As far as I am concerned, Rogers has now officially sunk to a new low. As if throttling their customers to the point that remote access products are unusable (never mind BitTorrent) on their network and charging for overages isn’t enough to put up with.

These losers are exhibit #1 as to why net neutrality needs to be law. You simply can’t trust ISPs to play by the rules on their own. I truly hope they get their butts kicked.

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