My ISP (Windstream DSL) started redirecting nxdomain responses years ago. I noticed when I mistyped a host alias I had set up for ssh and got back `connection refused` when it was not even a fully-qualified name.
Thankfully VeriSign did this to .com once with their SiteFinder service, so FOSS DNS servers generally have good support for assigning a particular IP address as "this is really NXDOMAIN". (Nowadays, I'm running Unbound locally anyway for DNSSEC.)
EDIT: the opening paragraph used to read "My ISP started doing this," but a closer look at TFA indicates this issue is about intercepting DNS queries to existing, legitimate search providers in order to substitute paid results.
Thankfully VeriSign did this to .com once with their SiteFinder service, so FOSS DNS servers generally have good support for assigning a particular IP address as "this is really NXDOMAIN". (Nowadays, I'm running Unbound locally anyway for DNSSEC.)
EDIT: the opening paragraph used to read "My ISP started doing this," but a closer look at TFA indicates this issue is about intercepting DNS queries to existing, legitimate search providers in order to substitute paid results.