Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector 198
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."
How convenient (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:let me guess (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:4, Insightful)
David
Re:Legality Question (Score:4, Insightful)
More like:
Re:Why not caps? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or worse. After exceeding your limit, you'll be stuck with 4KB/s for the rest of the month.
Re:How convenient (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Easy to avoid.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Easy to avoid.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Without knowing just what Google is going to produce, we need more information before deciding on how effective it's going to be one way or the other.
And the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, you find out for sure, and and then what? In a lot of areas the 'hi-speed market' is a monopoly.
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Why Should An ISP Care If You Use Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Kinda hard to do (Score:3, Insightful)
Rocket Science, it is not (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Legality Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Legality Question (Score:3, Insightful)
The crux of the problem is that US ISPs are advertising unlimited and don't want to deliver it. We in Australia went through that already, the ISPs got told to stop being jerks, and now they can't do that anymore.
The sooner the US ISPs start doing that the better - there's an adjustment period as people realise Internet connectivity needs to be treated like electricty - the more you use, the more it costs.
We need a car analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Throttling? Re-writing is worse for them. (Score:2, Insightful)