The “Break it Down” Blog

If you haven’t had your ear to the ground on the issue of ad-injection by ISPs, I’m about to get your blood boiling.

Basically, ISPs are starting to dabble more and more with analyzing your behavior online and injecting ads into the pages that get served back to you, regardless of the actual content being served off the web server. It seems Charter is the newest member to join the ranks of ISPs doing this.

So for example, say you went to Google and typed in “Ham”. On the search results page, you might see an ad for TGI Friday’s Grilled Ham and Cheese sandwich, but Google didn’t put it there, your ISP did as it fed that HTML back to you after getting it from Google.

How is this legal you ask? I have no fucking clue.

How is this different than the phone company injecting ads into your phone calls? “Remember to buy Coke!”

How is this different than going to Kinkos to get 100 copies of something, and they hand you back all the copies on watermarked paper that has their logo on it instead of plain white paper.

There has to be a lawsuit that is going to popup to stop this… between the wire tapping, the packet inspection, packet shaping and this… it might just be easier to go back to abacuses and a quill.

It seems Lauren Weinstein is demanding a call-to-arms over this and some sort of response; I agree.