I remember when VeriSign made this kind of change in the root. The flood of posts from NANOG was more than my mail server could handle.
It did the exact same thing. Took misspelled requests and sent the user to a "site finder" page.
To the people that are saying that this is no big deal, the web is a whole lot more than www.yourthinghere.com. One big problem is that it makes most SPAM filters fail. One of the checks it does is to see if the senders domain really exists. If the bad domain is redirected to an IP of any sort, it looks like the sender is OK. For a company with 30 users that have been around for a while, the increase of SPAM not being blocked via this check can be in the thousands per day.
And that is just one thing that failed redirects can break.
Another is site/server monitoring. Unless you put it IP address of the site server the failed site redirect will appear to the monitoring software the the site is up.
I have over 35 servers I monitor for availability, this includes DNS settings/monitoring. Now if the DNS server I use will redirect a failed lookup to a functional IP, it will not alert me to a down server.
Site Finder kind of stuff is OK for the average user, but remember the Web is not only used by 400 pound people with fat fingers looking for porn.
If they are going to break something that doesn't need fixing make it opt-in.
It did the exact same thing. Took misspelled requests and sent the user to a "site finder" page.