Google to expose connection-throttling ISPs

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 16 Jun 2008 at 09:59

Google is working on a set of network-analysis tools that will allow broadband users to see when their ISP is throttling their connection.

Broadband throttling - or "traffic shaping" as the ISPs prefer to call it - has become a hot issue on both sides of the Atlantic, with ISPs now routinely choking bandwidth at peak hours. Some ISPs block access to bandwidth-intensive applications such as BitTorrent, while others reduce a customer's speed if they pass a download threshold within peak hours.

A lack of transparency from ISPs has often left customers in the dark as to why their connection has slowed. Now Google says it let customers see what's happening on their line. "We're trying to develop tools, software tools... that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they're not happy with what they're getting - that they think certain services are being tampered with," said Google senior policy director Richard Whitt, at the Innovation 08 conference in San Francisco, according to a report on The Register.

"If the broadband providers aren't going to tell you exactly what's happening on their networks, we want to give users the power to find out for themselves," he added.

Whitt didn't reveal when the Google tools will become available, nor even if they will be made available outside of the US.

Do be evil?

Whitt did, however, disclose that Google considered backing the contentious US plan to scrap net neutrality back in 2005.

"The question was raised by the top level management at Google: What do we think about network neutrality - about this notion that broadband companies have the power to pick winners and losers on the internet? One position was that in the environment, Google would do quite well," Whitt said.

"This side of the argument said: We were pretty well known on the internet. We were pretty popular. We had some funds available. We could essentially buy prioritisation that would ensure we would be the search engine used by everybody. We would come out fine - a non-neutral world would be a good world for us."

Whitt claims that Google's conscience won out. "The other side said: We were a company that was born and raised on innovation. We were born from the internet here in Silicon Valley. We were able to take for granted the fact that we could innovate on the network without permission from anybody - any broadband company, any potential gatekeeper of the network trying to tell us what to do," he said. "We could bring innovation directly to the users and let them sort out exactly what they wanted and what they didn't want. Why would we muck with that? Why would we create haves and have nots on the internet?"