Google’s Broadband-Monitoring Tools On The Way
“When your broadband connection pushes you in deep thought, Google wants you to know that it has your back.”
Do you doubt that your ISP is doing some packet shaping or throttling your connection down? The fact is that you absolutely should know if shady crap like that is happening, after all you are paying for some sort of service close to what was promised.
Unfortunately, there is no real way for a user to know if his ISP is doing this to slow down his service — but soon Google Labs is about to release some software that will make you aware if and how your ISP is slowing down your connection.
“We are trying to develop tools, software tools…that allow people to detect what is happening with their broadband connections, so they can let (ISPs) know that they are not happy with what they are getting–that they think certain services are being tampered with,” Google Senior Policy Director Richard Whitt said Friday morning during a panel discussion at the Innovation ‘08 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. “If the broadband providers are not going to tell you exactly what is happening on their networks, we want to give users the power to find out for themselves.”
This is great news, but Google is not in it to be generous. They do not particularly care about net neutrality. It is just that since you are paying them, Google thinks customers have the right to know what the ISP is doing.
Whitt argues that innovation among application developers will stagnate without neutral networks, and he wants to see consumers join an “arms race” for Net neutrality–the idea that network operators should not be allowed to discriminate against content or applications or charge extra fees.
“The forces aligned against us are real. They have been there for decades. Their pockets are deep. Their connections are strong with those in Washington,” he said. “Maybe we can turn this into an arms race on the application software side rather a political game.”
A few of them would like to do this as a means of generating extra revenue — i.e. sites would have to pay them to guarantee the best service. Others want to do it to manage traffic — i.e. they have not built a good enough network to deliver promised speeds to all their customers at peak times so they slow down the services that tax their networks most.
Google has extensively argued that it is necessary to enact new regulations barring such activity; while broadband operators like AT&T and Comcast counter that the market will solve any perceived problems.
Well, if Google wants to point their “Do No Evil” brand of rhetoric at those ISPs interested in giving paying people a lower quality of service it is good for all. At least this is something of real interest from Google Labs.