January 30, 2009 by Matt Thomas
Google has waded even further into the net neutrality debate by announcing that it will be offering users tools to expose breaches of this principal, such as ISPs making life hard for bit torrent sites or other sites that they might not like.
For the uninitiated, net neutrality is the principal that the internet should treat all information equally without any judgements from ISPs about what’s more important. For example, you should be able to get information about Lindsey Lohan just as quickly as you can read government white papers.
Google, are staunch advocates of this principal, probably not least because their continued growth depends on it, and have released a statement to that effect, “At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation,” – Vint Cerf, Google.
There are however, other opinions. With numerous parties lobbying for some kind of ranking of sites by importance or the blocking/slowing down of particular sites that are proving an annoyance for authorities. For this reason Google, in conjunction with the PlanetLab Consortium, has launched an application called measurement lab or M-Lab for short.
The tool allows you to, amongst other things, check the speed of the connection and run diagnostis checks to see if your site is being artificially slowed down.
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