Executives at ISPs, much like robber barons and oil tycoons, cannot sleep at night and are not satisfied with themselves until they have squeezed every last penny from their customers' clenched fists. Recently, some large ISPs have begun automatically opting customers into a "DNS assistance" service. This "service" hijacks requests to non-existent host names and drives users to ISP provided search results laden with irrelevant ads.

For example, if you were to type in "facebook.co" on your Optimum Online connection, by default instead of receiving the typical "Problem loading page" error which is standard when an address does not resolve, Optimum Online instead resolved "facebook.co" to their own search engine (optimum.net) which conveniently provides at least 8 text links to ads and image ads displayed before a link to the real Facebook URL. We believe this is wildly inappropriate and have developed Assist This as a countermeasure to protest this invasive and abusive DNS hijacking.

Simply embed the PHP code in a sensible location inside any other PHP project, and visitors to your site will be automatically and silently opted out of their ISP's respective DNS assistance services, if technically possible. DNS assistance service usage and generated revenue will decline, and offending ISPs will be forced to service DNS requests according to standards once again.

Assist This currently disables Optimum Online DNS Assist and RoadRunner Web Address Error Redirect Service. Although Verizon offers a form of DNS assistance by default, users must manually change their gateway DNS settings to opt-out.