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."

Comments

Kinda hard to do

[R4nm4-kun]

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).

Potential money loss for Google

[ark1]

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.

Re:Legality Question

[notnAP]

Yes, you could. Now if you were, say, paying for up to 5 Mbps Transfer rate and your ISP is limiting your bandwidth below that, your legal options become a little more muddled. The fact that your ISP is throttling one kind of traffic over another, or to one destination or another, is not necessarily part of the equation.

How ironic that my feelings on the matter so closely match the quote "What we've got here is failure to communicate... Now I don't like this any more than you do."

Why not caps?

[KasperMeerts]

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.

Re:Legality Question

[Jarjarthejedi]

Yes, that's pretty much it. But on the flip side of things, should we expect to be able to run torrents 24/7-365? Or at what point is excessive bandwidth "excessive?" Ethicly (not legally, that's a lot more muddled...which is sad) I'd say that excessive bandwidth is anything over what the ISP told you they'd give you. If you want to run torrents 24/7 365, but you keep your per second bandwidth use under what the ISP told you they'd sell you, then I'd say you're not using excessive bandwidth.

When it comes to bandwidth the total amount really doesn't matter (despite what the ISPs would have you believe). It's the amount per second, or, more reasonably, minute, that is the real determining factor. If I use 300 Gigs of bandwidth, but do so in 10 gigs a night, at the times when every normal person is asleep, over the course of the entire month that's going to have far less of an impact on my neighbors than if I used 30 Gigs on the first of the month during the waking hours.

Hmm...anyone else getting visions of power company like pricing? You pay per gig (or something) a reasonable fee (such that the average person pays the same then as now), but if you use it during off hours you pay less. It's probably been thought of before but it might help, those torrents would be a lot cheaper to run during off hours, making normal usage faster during on hours.