The battle to make money from the bewildered heats up.

1. Opendns.com, which offers users alternative DNS servers that show ads when users make typos, is furious that Google struck a deal with Dell to pre-install software to show THEIR adverts for typos, "breaking" the opendns solution.

2. As reported last week, Cox experiments with a typo revenue stream by replacing their default DNS servers with ones powered by overture, a move pioneered by several other large ISPs before them.

3. While digesting this, a must-read is the current Business 2.0 article "The man who owns the internet," on the guy whose hundred+ million dollar domain bank outfit (the one that powers most of those generic placeholder sites with adverts that infest the web) struck a deal last year with Cameroon to wildcard all .cm typos made by users -- at least, those that were not previously intercepted by the aforementioned moves of Dell/Google/Yahoo/ISPs/openDNS! He is also pushing Colombia hard, waving fistfuls of cash for the right to the even more lucrative .co wildcard. (Columbia, if you are listening, it isn't any technical feat to do this. If you must sell out, why not run your own wildcard and collect all the revenue, not just a small part of it?).

What does it all mean? Follow the money: Powerful players are pushing to be first in line, in front of the old fashioned clunky concept of a "search website" you go to when you want something. They want to be first so they can simultaneously show you adverts and perhaps, if you are lucky, some non-paid results before handing the crumbs back to whomever is second, third and so on down the line. The fear of getting pushed back to second may be even driving Google to do a "little evil," if one believes OpenDNS.com on how hard it is to remove their Dell-installed software.

Where will it end? Who knows. One thing is for sure, the subversion of open name resolution standards, be it via pre-installed software (that verges on spyware), non-standard servers offered or provided by ISPs or country wildcard tricks, will continue as long as Google is making a mint at showing adverts before anyone else. Getting an old fashioned advertisement-free "site not found" for a mistyped domain may one day be something you only see in a Smithsonian interactive exhibit.