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."

How convenient

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?)

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?

"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?

You seem to be mistaken, they chose goodville.

ISP throttling

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

Kinda hard to do

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

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

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.

absolutely. but still - ever been pissed off because youtube is kinda slow lately?

Re:Kinda hard to do

"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

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.

Potential money loss for Google

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?

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?

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.

not necessary...

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

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.

Re:Legality Question

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

Re:Legality Question

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.

Re:Legality Question

This pricing model would make sense; bandwidth is priced according to the actual laws of supply and demand, rather than whatever the ISP feels like charging.

That's why ISPs won't do it.

Because most customers are doing just fine the way it is. The customers getting 'screwed' are the ones that want to transfer 1000s of GB per month for 35$ flat rate.

If the ISPs ever actually switched to a supply/demand pricing model, with tiered bandwidth, guess what, the same customers that are moaning about getting 'screwed' now by throttling, are going to be moaning that their internet costs $1500/mo when they they run torrents at 25down:2up Mbps 24x7.

Meanwhile 'regular' people will be complaining because they don't understand their up/down ratios, why bandwidth costs more going in one direction than the other, why they had to pay $5 extra one month when they didn't do anything out of the ordinary.... except update windows to sp3... and according to the MS page, thats only a 97kb download.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68C48DAD-BC34-40BE-8D85-6BB4F56F5110&displaylang=en#filelist [microsoft.com]

In effect: everybody loses.

Re:Legality Question

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.

Re:Legality Question

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."

Re:Legality Question

It's not really a bad thing, either.

I mean, they can't possibly guarantee you a certain speed. Try explaining to Joe Perv that even though he has the capability of 20 MbPS, the server that has his Chinese industrial accident porn can only deliver at 20 bPS.

There's enough reasons to sling vitriol at unethical ISPs, but advertising "up to [speed]" isn't one of them.

Re:Legality Question

Chinese industrial accident porn

You have made this entire thread worthwhile.

Re:Legality Question

It is if they're the ones stopping you reaching the speed they advertised.

How would you feel if hard drive manufacturers didn't give you all the drive space they advertised or if your new sports car couldn't really run at the advertised max speed all the time? oh, wait...

Seriously though, living in the UK where we have ADSL max and I get advertised as being allowed up to 8mbps broadband but living in an area I can only get 2mbps is one thing. When the ISP then only lets me have 512kbps if I'm lucky half the time despite me getting shafted harder than most people the rest of the time it's a whole different matter, it's a kick in the nads. They really need to rethink their business plan if not only can they not supply what they're selling, but if they then can't even supply 1/4th and can in fact only supply 1/16th of what they're selling and even less than that with some ISPs.

Re:let me guess

Sure it works, but the bandwidth is crap.

Re:Easy to avoid....

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.