Is it a matter of net neutrality? Certainly. Rather than returning NXDOMAIN, as is generally accepted practice (and allows your browser to decide – Firefox, for example, tries different extensions (facebook.ca, facebook.com, facebook.org) and Opera gives a notice page), Rogers returns their own search results (Google’s mis-spelled domain services are not universal, btw).

Rather than returning an expected value (domain doesn’t exist) it returns ad-filled search results. It has injected content into your browsing experience.. while your browser still has access, yes, it does not have the same level of access because it doesn’t receive valid non-existent domain notifications. It really is just like calling someone who isn’t there, but instead of getting voice mail, you get a telemarketer trying to sell you bounty towels.

While it’d be nice if their claims were true, all I see from the claims outlined here and the slides is that they are trying to gloss over derogatory traffic management issues by redefining net neutrality to be about applications rather than all transmissions. If you use distributed transfer methods or encrypted transmissions, you will be throttled – that is not net neutrality. The individual applications may not be targeted, but the data they share is.

And since it only addresses issues when a URL is mispelled, it has nothing to do with the policy on net neutrality. In your own way you make the point Mike was trying to make with his first slide. The first goal here is to define what is meant by net neutrality. Replacing the Google page for mis-spelled URL’s is has nothing to do with net neutrality when it comes to having access to applications.

Case in point – most times when I’m at home on Rogers, it takes me 5-10 tries to get my blog to load up – I got so frustrated I just edited the hosts file on my computer so I could always get it, regardless of Rogers intercepting my DNS requests.