Charter Communications Hijacks Windows Live Search

[Ouroboros]

I use Charter (5Mbps cable internet) as my ISP and didn't notice anything odd when I tried putting a search term in the addy bar in IE(7). Google is set as the default search engine in my IE, anyway. Normally I use Firefox with the Googlebar extension, so your scenario wouldn't affect me in the day to day, but I still find it disturbing if Charter is indeed rerouting traffic to places where I don't want it going. I don't see anything explicity illegal about it, but certainly unethical.

O

[tonybradley]

I did a capture of the network traffic showing the difference between searches done on Google, Yahoo or AOL, and how the search attempts with Windows Live Search are redirected to Charter's branded Yahoo search site. That has been submitted to a Microsoft contact of mine who has forwarded it on to Microsoft's legal team for further investigation. We'll see what, if anything, happens from this point.