Sunday, June 15, 2008

Google Tools Will Tell You If Your ISP Is Slowing Down Your Connection [Google]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/312058734/google-tools-will-tell-you-if-your-isp-is-slowing-down-your-connection

And I was starting to feel unfulfilled by the stuff coming out of Google's labs. Its senior policy director, Richard Whitt, says that they're cooking up software that'll tell you if your ISP is screwing with or slowing down your connection because you're hogging too much bandwidth, and what exactly they're doing to it. (There's already some available, BTW, since Whitt didn't mention a release date.) But it's not necessarily because they believe willy nilly in net neutrality.

Google just thinks that you have a right to know what your ISP is doing. If your ISP won't tell you, you should have the tools to figure out. In fact, according to one article cited by Hot Hardware, when net neutrality first started becoming an issue, at first Google considered just going along with ISPs: "We would come out fine—a non-neutral world would be a good world for us." Do no evil, eh? [Hot Hardware via /.]