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

How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

What, where, why, how? (when?)

[Deltaspectre]

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?

Is there an award for understatements?

[paiute]

"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.

Re:Is there an award for understatements?

[Asmor]

You seem to be mistaken, they chose goodville.

ISP throttling

[ForexCoder]

And watch the ISPs throttle this download to 1 byte/minute

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).

Re:Kinda hard to do

[Asmor]

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. And in this case their interests align with the customers' interests, against the evil ISPs.

Re:Kinda hard to do

[Comatose51]

"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.

Re:Kinda hard to do

[iangoldby]

many ISP's do limit the whole bandwidth, but this application would have to detect that only a certain type of trafic is limited

Sorry to jump on you (you were just the first to say it), but please can we be clear:

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.

Re:Legality Question

[Asmor]

I'm sure there's stuff in the legalese of the contract you signed which says that that number's an upper limit and you should just be happy they give you any bandwidth at all, you filty customer.

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.

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:Why not caps?

[Kenz0r]

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.

Free market capitalism, eh? It's just crazy enough to work. We should try that here. :) I live in Belgium too, and I strongly disagree with parent. Our internet access may be neutral, but they're slower (4Mbits down / 400Kbits upload is the common standard for our adsl), and we're mocked by almost every other Western-European country for our traffic capped.
Seriously, the biggest provider (a partially state-owned company, which has the entire nation's telephone net infastructure) charges 41 euros (61 usd) for 12 Gigabytes of traffic per month. Twelve, that's nothing! If you want to buy an extra pack of 5 Gb, it costs another 5 euros. Our internet providers would make a terrible model to follow, capped internet is almost just as terrible as a non-neutral net.

Re:Legality Question

[TihSon]

...you filthy customer. The most concise phrase I have yet heard to describe how I feel dealing with Canadian Telcos and ISPs.

not necessary...

[SuperBanana]

Comcast recently announced they bumped upstream bandwidth from 384kbit to 1mbit (FiOS pressure, anyone?) and they've also said they won't monkey about with p2p, right?

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.

Re:Legality Question

[spazdor]

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.