Canadian ISP (Rogers) Begins Testing Content Injection

Because of the power that your ISP holds, it’s been worried for some time that they could easily take advantage of your web-surfing to exploit a variety of scenarios. One of these came to light this past June, when a certain Texas ISP was caught inserting advertisements into webpages – even those that didn’t have ads to begin with. Those that had ads, had some replaced.

There are a variety of other scenarios though, such as tracking, censorship and something that Rogers, a Canadian ISP, has just begun trialing.. injection of notices. According to Ars Technica, Rogers have injected bandwidth-usage notices into the Google.com homepage, as you can see in the thumbnail below. This… is wrong, and notices like these should be sent to the default ISP e-mail address, not pushed in your face into your internet.

I’m a Rogers Cable/Internet subscriber, but haven’t seen such messages yet. I also don’t think I come anywhere close to my monthly bandwidth allotment either, which might be why. While such a simple notice being injected into your page isn’t a huge deal, it’s notable because it could be a sign of what’s to come, or at least what’s possible.

Credit: Lauren Weinstein

Despite the fact that the message is exclusively a notice to subscribers about the service rather than commercial content, some proponents of network neutrality believe that third-party modification of web content-particularly at the ISP-level-fundamentally changes the nature of the Internet in detrimental ways.

Source: Ars Technica