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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...
...you filthy customer. The most concise phrase I have yet heard to describe how I feel dealing with Canadian Telcos and ISPs.
In B.C., our fascism is green.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Yeah, well it's their fault. The ISPs have been receiving fees from consumers for years that was supposed to be earmarked towards infrastructure upgrades. The only ISP that seems to be actually investing any money is Verizon with their FiOS service. Comcast has been doing nothing but riding the coat tails of technical innovation of being able to push more bits through the same old pipes. However, that is maxing out as evidenced by their HD service. They are compessing HD to the point where there is picture drop out and obvious compression artifacts. This is also why they are limiting bandwith.
David
"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."
That's when you know when you can really trust someone, when both parties' interests are aligned. Trusting someone's good intentions has a long history of disappointment.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I suspect it'll be a bit more sophisticated than that. I don't know a whole lot about networking, but I suspect it shouldn't be too hard to fake a connection so that it's difficult to distinguish it from a torrent. Thus the only way to "cheat" on the test would be to unthrottle all torrents, and in that case you're not really cheating anymore, are ya?
Of course, as has been said earlier in the discussion, Google's likely most interested in the effects of throttling on their own applications, notably Youtube. So if they only test connections to Youtube, then it either forces ISPs to be caught red-handed or unthrottle youtube, a win-win situation for Google.
Net neutrality is not about giving all types of traffic the same priority. You can have a neutral net in which VOIP packets have a very high priority, HTTP packets a slightly lower priority, and bit torrent packets are bottom of the pile.
Network neutrality is about giving all traffic of the same type the same priority regardless of its source. In other words, in a neutral net ISPs would not make deals with certain content providers to prioritise their traffic.
It is really important that everyone understands this. Some of the organisations who are against net neutrality are using the argument that it is only sensible to prioritise protocols such as VOIP (prioritisation by type, which most people would agree with), when what they really want is to extract money out of the content providers by prioritising traffic by source.
Why is prioritisation by source such a bad thing? Because it turns the 'old internet' on its head. Whereas at present anyone can be a content provider, in the brave new world of a non-neutral net only large organisations can afford to pay the ISPs to deliver their content at an acceptable speed.
I will happy pay for my bandwidth by the gigabyte if it is sold at market value. If they set up their pricing to reward lighter use or off-peak use, I will change my downloading habits to take advantage of it.
The ones really being "screwed" under the current model are the light users, who push a good 2 or 3 megabytes a day to check their email and the weather report, don't call tech support very often, and are paying $60 a month to subsidize us compulsive downloaders.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I don't see how this can be. when they're charging per gigabyte, then the more gigabytes they can deliver the more dollars they get!
If you're paying a flat rate for your connection, they've already got their money for the month, regardless of how much downloading you do. To maximize revenue, they have an incentive to discourage downloading, as this allows them to cram more flat-rate subscribers onto less infrastructure.
If instead they can levy a charge on every packet they deliver, then they'll want to facilitate your bandwidth consumption however they can.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!