Google Developing "Net Neutrality" Detector

Companies like Comcast and Sympatico have been accused of - or even admitted - throttling of P2P applications. It even earned Comcast Congressional scrutiny and an FCC hearing. To make matters worse, ATT and Time-Warner Cable are experimenting with metered usage, and Comcast is trying out throttling all traffic - not just P2P - to high-usage customers. What's a user to do if he suspects throttling? Google is working on an answer.

During a panel discussion Thursday morning at the Innovation 08 Net Neutrality event at Santa Clara University, Richard Whitt said (as quoted by the Register):

"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."

It should be noted this the first such tool ever developed. Earlier I wrote about the Max Planck Institute's tool. Problem is, the throttling test servers are always busy, and when I first wrote about the tool, the second test, a "broadband link characteristics" tool, it popped up a NSFW site that turned me off to the tool. Trying it again upon writing this new post, it seems they have eliminated that, so I can now now remove my earlier warning about that tool.

Whitt continued:

"The forces aligned against us are real. They've been there for decades. Their pockets are deep. Their connections are strong with those in Washington. Maybe we can turn this into an arms race on the application software side rather a political game."

As that's true - a lot of this is about what is best for the corporations and frighteningly, a lot of the legislators involved don't even understand the Internet (Ted Stevens, anyone?) - why is Google doing this? After all, a non-neutral Internet wouldn't affect them, would it now?

According to Google,

"One position was that in the environment, Google would do quite well.

"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 prioritization 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."

"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. 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?"

OK, so it's a lot of "Don't be evil"-ish spin. Is that all there is to it? After all, a for-profit corporation sees the bottom line as the bottom line.

Richard Bennett and George Ou don't necessarily see it that way, and I wouldn't be so quick to judge Google's move as totally altruistic, either.

Still, a tool such as this (that worked, re: the Max Planck tool referenced above) would still be a great thing, wouldn't it - despite what may or may not be behind it. What do you readers think?