Imagine a world in which the phone is always answered. Yet no one says "wrong number" when it is, and where every answering voice strives to be whomever you might have called.

It isn't hell.

It is a fully realized vision of the Web according to Comcast, Earthlink, Verizon and the other Internet Service Providers who are working to reroute every Web surfing URL mistake (at the foundation a wrong number) to pages of profitable advertising.

Earthlink has had the British company Barefruit doing this profitable work for them since 2006. I wonder what they were thinking. Network security researcher Dan Kaminsky of IOActive found and last week demonstrated a sweepingly dangerous security bug in their live code (they've fixed it). It was the kind of security hole which can see your personal resources fly irretrievably away down the data pipe.

The award for best impersonation of intended destinations goes, thus far, to the Internet domain registrar Network Solutions Inc. On April 8, TechKrunch and GotGame caught Network Solutions injecting unmapped subdomains into the domains users had tried for and missed -- not all domains, but domains among those hosted by Network Solutions.

It appears to my non-lawyer eyes to have been perfectly legal. In fact it was customer-approved by a passage in the contract for hosting services, althought it created for a while an illustrative faux GotGame page which embodied what Kaminsky [PPT slides] called the "Times Square effect:"

When you see Times Square in a movie, that's not Times Square. All ads have been replaced, because there's no contractual obligation not to replace them

Perfectly outrageous too then, fulfilling in small the nightmare of wrong numbers which answer and skillfully impersonate whomever we intended to call.

The corporations involved refer to each arrangement as "a service," as though it really were and none of us would think otherwise.

Paul Vixie, one of the creators of the technologies at stake here, put a pin right in that odd balloon recently in a comment to the DNS Operations mail group:

I think the issue there is more that Earthlink has deployed a totally annoying system that's slow, has no way to opt-out (short of making users change their DNS) and generally doesn't work. Not even to mention that it offers users no benefits. ... What's most surprising to me is that Earthlink of all ISPs is doing this. Maybe they are just trying to prove why users need network neutrality (groan, I know).

Assuming we are loathe to live in a world where wrong numbers incessantly mislead us into useless interaction, and may expose us to daunting security risks, we do have to speak up.

People sometimes run for president in part to make worthwhile reforms sought by their supporters.

Isn't this one of those reforms?

Let's ask.