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Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector
bigwophh writes "Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt — Senior Policy Director for Google — announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs."
Oh sure, Google freeloads off all the ISPs and is now developing a tool to detect when ISPs fight back. ...what, you say, Google pays for its bandwidth already? They haven't just hacked their servers into the Internet? Hmmm, maybe the ISPs lied then...
This to be followed by googles entry into the ISP market?
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
FTA:
What:
Throttling detector
Where:
The interwho
Why:
Because ISPs like to throttle to give Papa Joe and his daughters a healthy feed of myspace and rain hellfire upon Torrenting Sam and his goon squad of seeders
How:
No details
When:
Who knows?
My UID is prime... is yours?
"We were pretty well known on the internet. We were pretty popular. We had some funds available."
Still, good on them for coming to a fork in the road - one to eviltown and the other to goodville - and choosing wisely.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
And watch the ISPs throttle this download to 1 byte/minute
Remind me if i'm wrong, but if i'm pay for say...a 5 Mbps Transfer rate and my ISP is limiting my bandwidth below that, couldn't I take them to court?
It's not really that easy to make a tool that would determine 100% sure that the ISP is throttling your connection, many ISP's do limit the whole bandwidth, but this application would have to detect that only a certain type of trafic is limited.
I think Google is afraid it's youtube dreams are being squashed by evil ISP's. Google more than sure doesn't give a cent about P2P applications, so their app probably will only work for http throttling, namely flv streaming/youtube.
Sorry for the google bashing, but this doesn't seem like google is as much interested in defending the poor customers against the evil ISP's as it's trying to defend it's own commercial interests.
Something else, I don't think there will be a big success in bateling the big ISP's, as trafic rises, there is no way they can maintain the current bandwidth/price ratio, even with massive profit cuts and investments in infrastructure. ISP's are overselling at a massive scale, more than 100 times their banwidth capacity. (well, in the US it's possible to maintain current prices since it's one of the most overpriced countries in this domain).
What do you mean "it's not available from Google.cn"?
I suspect the main aim here is to reduce ads injecting by ISP which would take away money from Google ads. Presenting it as throttling detection tool is just a way to make it more appealing.
Whatever happened to VJ's pathchar?
Whomever modded the parent as insightful needs to learn to read the entire comment and the subject. This is pitiful. I just hope meta moderation works.
Here in Belgium and other European countries, bandwidth is not throttled but capped. I can Bittorrent as much as I want, but I fall back to 1-3 kB/s as soon as I hit the 100 gigabyte barrier. This system is waaaay less underhand or hypocrite. FYI, I'm at 30.7 GB this month. It resets the day after tomorrow.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
Wouldn't this be easy for ISPs to avoid? Just un-throttle any connections to Google's servers? Just figure out where the test is being done and don't throttle that site. Easy.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I've found something quite fishy going on in the UK.
We currently have an 8Mb line, and I do mean 8, it gets to that speed quite often, especially in transfers from my university machines, other Janet sites, and other good download locations.
Otherwise we get around 4Mb.
Ok, all fine, but now UK ISP have started talking about max 2Mb lines in my area, and several have 'tested' my line and found it cannot go above 2mb, even when I clearly can get much greater speeds then this, and have before and after their 'test'.
Since this is usually accompanied by 'great deals' on 2mb packages, I smell several day old former fishies.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Well, funny thing then that when my bittorrent client inched above 45-50kB/sec (less than half of the new limit, which is 125kB/sec), shortly thereafter ping times exploded from 20-25ms to 300-500ms. On a second occasion, it went up to 1000ms to 3000ms. Even if you throttle back to, say, 20kB/sec, ping times stay the same. They don't drop until you stop the client completely. Seems to take about 10 minutes for the throttling to kick in. It's so bad that ssh latency goes up to 5-10 seconds, and the web interface to my p2p client completely stopped working.
The same thing happened with eDonkey, so either they're going off traffic volume, or they're detecting any p2p traffic.
Please help metamoderate.
The Swedish Post and Telecom Agency has had a tool for testing your connection available to the public at http://www.bredbandskollen.se/ for a few years. It's open source and you do the test in your browser.
... use Google TiSP instead!
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Its not like the ISPs are denying it anymore.
Sure, you find out for sure, and and then what? In a lot of areas the 'hi-speed market' is a monopoly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And then we do what?... DDoS them off the Net?! :-O
What I don't get is why an ISP would care if you encrypt things.
If you use encryption on your torrent connection you'd think that would be good for an ISP, if they're required by law to block people from downloading movies and songs but they can't see it since you're encrypting everything that should get them off the hook.
Bell Canada just seemed to just say screw this and started to throttle all encrypted traffic. Although they said it was because of bandwidth issues.
I say for an ISP ignorance is bliss!
A client app that connects to a Goggle app that starts two downloads, each with CRC data. One download is a large html text file over port 80. The other could be the same file, but downloaded with a MIME type for video or other binary file, downloaded over a port suspected of being throttled.
Compare download times. Check the CRC against the port 80 html file to see if it was altered (ISP ad injection).
I think you would have a pretty good idea if something was being throttled or ad injected then.
Of course, embarrassed, shifty ISPs could then monitor for the Google test app and allow just that to go through unaltered and unthrottled.
Ever notice that Google sometimes does squicky, evil things, but then they turn around and take the side of Net Neutrality and spend time and effort on a project like this? Interesting..
you retards... she makes a damn good point
Once the tool is ready how will Google get it to the masses? I'm talking about your average Joe Internet user. Let's face it, /. users will probably have this along with other nerd/geek/informed Internet surfers, but will that be enough noise to stop broadband corporations from throttling? Broadband companies will only care when average Joe starts complaining that he's paying for a service that isn't completely there.
Can I bum a sig?
Detecting bandwidth throttling isn't rocket science. I'm pretty sure they have a handful of engineers at Google with the requisite IQ.
IMHO this is the sort of thing Google needs to do to redeem itself in the eyes of the geek community. It's only something on this scale that is going to deter ISPs from making throttling the de-facto reality -- after which it becomes exceedingly difficult to combat.
We should be applauding this.
I don't expect some sort of bot to go off on one when this sort of nonsense is posted (because I doubt that it is yet possible to construct one that wont missfire on /.) but I would hope that a supa dupa meta whatever from /. would have picked up on it and binned it by now.
What a wanker - whoever AC is.
The FCC really step in and say you guys need to come with a CIR in the context of best effort delivery and stick with it.
public boolean isConnectionThrottled()
{
return true;
}
Just had this the other week about ping times.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/01/2225228
Doesn't look to be Comcast.
If the ISPs ever actually switched to a supply/demand pricing model, with tiered bandwidth
If ISP actually moved to a free market they'd have to pay back the billions of dollars the government gave them to build out their networks.
FalconShould there be a Law?
i'm convinced that my ISP (charter) is throttling youtube specifically.
Know why? Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, owns a controlling interest in Charter Cable (;-
FalconShould there be a Law?
That was probably the funniest racist troll I've seen so far. Also, that people even get offended is even funnier.
ah. the evil thickens. i literally have only one other option for my area, and that's clearwire, which is just unacceptably slow and overpriced. color me depressed.
You probably won't like this either then, Paul Allen also kicked in $500 million to start DreamWorks SKG. Don't let it get too down though, DreamWorks uses Linux.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yay, some quotes from some Google guy. Nothing technical.
First, you can bet your ass this is pretty damned hard not to get false positives, however I will admit before someone does it for me that the collective mind of Google is much smarter than I. I will not say it cannot be done. Its just unlikely ( still nothing technical ).
I work for a company that provides software ( and firmware ) for the largest ( physically, and capacity wise ) commercial satellite in the world. It only moves IP packets ( plus meta ). I am not a sales person, I design, prototype, sometimes build the software that controls the flows. I certainly maintain a heavy hand in in it all technically, I have nothing to do with service level policies, other than providing feasible solutions.I feel somewhat qualified to tell you strait up that this 'net neutrality' thing is both a bunch of bullshit and that its prompted by "Board Room" level jealousy of profits.
Before I get into the heavy of it I want to tell you that I feel that if you buy 1mbps you should get 1mbps. None of this "until you reach 15GB" crap... unless thats what you paid for.Unlimited should be without qualification unless they qualify it up front ( meaning its not "unlimited" ). Truth in advertising is the key here.
But on the other hand, you want your VOIP calls to be clear, you want your game session to be non-choppy. You want your web pages to take temporary priority over your FTP session, oh yes you do.
Likewise, you do not want the guy in the next cubicle to take up all of available bandwidth downloading [insert something big] over P2P or whatever you kids do these days to defeat fairness controls.Some of the legislation put forth in the name of neutrality would make it illegal for me to make it fair.
When I first got into this business it was common practice to oversell by five times, I recently have had documents cross my desk that suggest it is common practice to sell it 80 times over. Given that providers like TimeWarner want to jack the max speed to 15mb for an extra 5 bucks, its no wonder that they then want to put into place caps on usage ( they didn't mean you should use it ).
Oh wait, we were talking about neutrality. Right. So anyhow, you have groups trying to prioritize traffic, and then you have groups trying to tell the googles and the ebays in the world that they need to pony up some cash if they want fair access to the customers. This has nothing to do with QoS, this is extortion. We already have laws that cover this. Google is taking the wrong tact in the sense that they are trying to rally people behind them in demanding fair access, and I think they should be pressing criminal charges.
Do not get me wrong, my satellite covers a large portion of Asia, it has nothing to do with what is being proposed right here with Net Neutrality, other than the fact that my Internet is getting messed with by largish companies and politicians that do not know much about the problems.
Please... understand what you are proposing before you start pushing the badwagon.
I want to be clear, I feel that legislated "Net Neutrality" is bad, it will not work out well. I feel that there are plenty of laws in place that should incarcerate corporations ( if only we could ) for the obvious laws they are breaking by trying to force popular internet sites to pay them for access to customers that are already paying them. I would like to get into honesty in advertising, and why its really up to you guys to fix this, but it would rather go in a book for I am long winded.
Really guys and gals, we need some perspective on this, no one wants our internet messed with like this and if you leave it up to the corps and the elected, its going to get messed up. I am not sure what you expect to gain by this, but I am sure what you end up with is a pile of crap if it continues for too long. Please, we can apply laws that have been enforced for decades to cover this, its not mystery to us, its time we demystify it to everyone else.
P.S. Isnt the posting editing window really small now?
--dant
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
For another euro20, I could upgrade to 100/10 Mbps, also unthrottled and unmetered. With adequate infrastructure (i.e. capable of delivering what was sold to the customers), there is little point in throttling by ISPs.
The real problem is that ISPs in the US oversell their infrastructure. Airlines get penalized for overselling their infrastructure. So should ISPs; if they don't have the bandwidth available, they should not sell it. At present, it seems they are selling the equivalent of "standby" bandwidth, in the expectation of a lot of "no-shows", to use airline terminology, and are astounded that persistently too many of the ticket-holders show up.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
So a car dealer has two Ferrari's, but me sells 3 of them.
:)
The next day 3 customers show up to pick up their Ferraris, clearly the car dealer is outraged!
3 showing up when he only expected 2 even though he sold 3?! Unbelievable!
But the solution is simple, since the evil customers expected to get what they payed for, it's clearly all their fault,
and hence it is only fair to the car dealer that he be fully paid and the customers will have to timeshare.
Of course if the customers drive in California, the car dealer will have to be paid an additional $100/day since
driving in such a high traffic area it just completely unfair to the car dealer who only expected costumers to drive in rural, desolate areas of Idaho.
And in case some people don't know how to make the connection here, just replace "Ferrari" with "GB bandwidth" and "car dealer" with "ISP" (and what ever else needed to make perfect sense
If we let's ISP's get away with any of it, they won't just stop with throttling BitTorrent, they will oversell their bandwidth 1000-10,000x instead of just 10-30x and then throttle absolutely everything to make it all meet. Suddenly you downloading your 500kb Email attachment is an overuse of bandwidth and deserves to be cut down to 3kb/s. But don't worry, that annoying 1.2MB Flash commercial with be subsidized so it won't count and will stream with 10MB(yte)/s over your fiber connection to annoy you instantly. But you can't complain, after all you are getting your full bandwidth worth on SOME content.
In my overly optimistic way, i would hope that it doesn't really matter who releases such a tool and weather it works or not, just that the greedy ISP think there might be something to nail them down or at least make their unethical misdeeds visible might be enough for them to be not quite as bold, maybe even start campaigning with 'no throttling, test it yourself'. But i forgot that in the US there isn't really any ISP Broadband competition, i mean in the areas i lived in there was only once choice, first it was either Cable or nothing... then we moved, now we had the choice of At&t DSL or.... nothing.... yay. And even in those areas where people are lucky enough to have TWO offerings, chances are very good that both are evil bastards and already throttling
Now that i have been living in Germany for a while, i almost get weekly adds from some ISP i have never heard of supposedly being cheaper then my current isp. My 16MBit/s connection combined with some unlimited call package is cheap enough though (compared to the us) but it makes me feel good that if there is ever even the hint of throttling that i can simply switch one of the many other isp's.
Google should worry more about ISPs selling out to Phorm. Advert re-writing strikes closer to their revenue stream.
At The Register
Can we really trust a tool that is developed and published by Google not to produce results that promote Google's interests? (Remember, this is the same company that claims to be in favor of a "neutral" net, but helps the Chinese government to censor and filter.) Very likely, the tool will sound an alarm if the network isn't optimized to get you to Google or YouTube. But what will it do if your ISP has a deal with Google that degrades a Google competitor? Hmmmm.
Do you _really_ think your ISP has 100Mbps of dedicated internet _per customer_ at euro75?
So they get to ensure that ISP's don't throttle Google traffic, for risk of being detected by their customers.
Google's competitors remain throttled.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)