Net Neutrality Through Transparency?
Google helps launch a tool to keep ISPs honest.
Whether government imposed or otherwise, it’s not an easy task trying to determine whether your ISP is manipulating parts of your traffic. Or even if you simply have a flaky connection (although, government conspiracies are clearly more fun).
As a large proponent for net neutrality, and in a bid to provide ISP transparency, Google, along with various other researchers and organisations, is launching a wonderful service it dubs the Measurement Lab, or ‘M-Lab’ for short. Vint Cerf, widely regarded as the father of the internet, details the announcement in this Google blog.
Researchers already develop tools that run various diagnostic tests to check for connection speed, throttling, among many others. The problem up until now, he says, has been the lack of hardware support, with these very researchers missing widely-distributed servers with decent connectivity. “This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools,” he says.
In order to address this barrier “Google will provide researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. All data collected via M-Lab will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on,” explains Cerf. It is “intended to be a truly community-based effort,” he adds, welcoming others to provide hardware and other resources to help push the platform into success.
Evidently, M-Lab isn’t the set of tools, itself – rather, it is a portal to a collection of distributed servers dispersed throughout the world. On this dedicated platform, however, researchers can create their measurement tools, all the while allowing the public to take advantage of them.
The service opens with a collection of three tools, the first of which is a ‘Network Diagnostic Tool’ that measures connection speed and diagnoses any issues that might inhibit it. The second is called ‘Glasnost’ which tests for manipulation of Bittorrent traffic. The last, ‘Network Path and Application Diagnosis’, checks for common issues that affect network problems local to you.
Two more listed as upcoming are ‘DiffProbe’ that lets you know if an ISP is prioritising traffic lower than others and ‘NANO’ which finds out if as ISP degrades performance for a “certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.”
You can take the aforementioned tools for a spin right here, although the service might be a little slow due to popularity. Cerf mentions that like “M-Lab itself these tools are still in development, and they will only support a limited number of simultaneous users at this initial stage.”
I can’t wait to see how far this spiffy service goes – hopefully it has the positive, competitive effect on ISPs that one would expect.
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