Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:50:00 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110228/11332813302/mediacom-puts-its-own-ads-other-websites-including-google-apple.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110228/11332813302/mediacom-puts-its-own-ads-other-websites-including-google-apple.shtml inject their own content, especially advertising, onto websistes. AT&T even insisted that customers would like it if AT&T did this. Public outcry and Congressional scrutiny seemed to lead many ISPs to shelve such plans... but you knew it was only a matter of time.

Broadband Reports is noting that Mediacom, who recently started using DNS redirection to feed ads (rather than 404 pages) to people who ended up on non-existent web pages (and who made its "opt-out" option not really work), has jumped into the fray and is injecting its own ads for its own services on all sorts of websites including those of Google and Apple -- two companies known for caring an awful lot about what their website looks like in each and every pixel:

This seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. If users choose to modify websites themselves, that's one thing, but having your ISP jump into the stream and adding its own advertisements to websites seems to go way over the line of what's appropriate. And, you have to wonder how effective it is. If I ever saw something like this, it would immediately make me look for alternative ISPs.

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