Google’s new tools helps you fight net neutrality
Is your ISP censoring contents on the Internet? Are they throttling or blocking BitTorrent downloads? How do you know? Ever since the Internet emerged as a powerful and vital platform for modern societies, economies and governments, various organizations and even the government has been trying to bring it under it’s control for commercial and political reasons. Net neutrality is a serious issue.
For the end users, it’s difficult and at times impossible to determine whether your ISP is being fair to you. To address this issue, Google announced the launch of Measurement Lab - an open, distributed server platform founded by the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google Inc and academic researchers that allows users to find out if their ISP is blocking certain Internet applications.
Over the course of early 2009, Google will provide researchers a widely-distributed server network consisting of 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe, that will enable them to develop tools that allow users to run diagnostics, and attempt to discern if their ISP is blocking or throttling particular applications. M-Lab already provides several tools to measure their Internet connection. Currently there are three tools available:
Network Diagnostic Tool provides a sophisticated speed and diagnostic test. Apart from the usual upload and download speeds, it also attempts to determine what, if any, problems limited these speeds, differentiating between computer configuration and network infrastructure problems.
Glasnost attempts to detect whether your Internet access provider is performing application-specific traffic shaping. Currently, you can test if your ISP is throttling or blocking BitTorrent. Tests for other applications will follow soon.
Network Path and Application Diagnosis diagnoses some of the common problems effecting the last network mile and end-users' systems. These are the most common causes of all performance problems on wide area network paths.
M-Labs is an excellent move by Google that will bring the much needed transparency which is so vital to the Internet. Hopefully, as more and more researchers join in and the network expand the users of other countries will get an opportunity to accurately diagnose their Internet connection.
