I would be delighted to see some software to actually measure throttling; there's nothing the network neutrality needs more than some actual data about what is happening and how pervasive it is.
My guess is that most ISPs do no throttling outside of peer-to-peer filesharing.
Its in their best interest to prevent throttling. If they had nothing to gain by doing this, they probably wouldn't do it. (more appropriately, nothing to lose by not doing it) Its awesome that they are going to try to do this, but one can't look at it from a completely altruistic standpoint. Obviously we could debate until we are blue in the face exactly why or how much of their reasoning was to defend users or their bottom line, but I think its important to make the point that its in their best interest that their users can use as much bandwidth as they want. They aren't the bandwidth provider, they are the provider of something to provide the bandwidth for.
Perhaps I should have said it's nice to see Google giving us the tools we need to defend ourselves against those who may limit our access to bandwidth intensive websites, like youtube, and in turn defending Googles ability to sell ads on those videos.
However it's a brilliant strategy nonetheless. It's essentially crowdsourcing the policing of ISPs.
This is part of an escalation of the Net Neutrality war. Will Google actually release it and risk angering the companies that bring Google and other services to the net? Will Comcast do anything to counter? How much will it really affect us?
Both sides have their turf to defend. Comcast saves money by throtting bandwidth, Google makes money by making sure no site with AdSense is throttled.
I just hope it isn't government rulings that decide this in the end.
I am paying around 50$/month for my broadband and is pretty much connected 8hours a day.
Does that mean someone else is paying for me? I.E. most people surf less and there for don't use the 50$ dllars they pay?
I mean how is this actually working, internet used to be expensive like 10 years ago when you paid per hour and had a modem.
I thought it was so cheap now because it is cheap to let people have the bandwidth.
I don't really get this issue with wanting to control what people access.
Why don't the broadbandproviders charge you for how much bandwidth you use instead?
ISPs charge consumers a monthly fee for theoretically unlimited usage because that's the way most people are comfortable paying for their internet usage. Even a geek like me doesn't have a clear idea of how much bandwidth I use in a month, so for most people a per-byte-transferred pricing scheme would be totally unclear. Contrast this with something like per-minute phone usage pricing.
Bandwidth certainly is cheap, and constantly getting cheaper, but the average consumer's bandwidth usage is also increasing. A few years ago, as filesharing became mainstream, broadband ISPs found it much more costly to provide unlimited service. Their ways of managing this extra cost include some throttling but also, interestingly, a proliferation of local peering.
Local peering is when two small ISPs, say in a single city, notice they are both paying their ISPs in order to send traffic to each other, and decide to instead run a line between themselves and exchange traffic on that line instead of paying their ISPs. There was never any reason to do this sort of peering on a local level until we all started sharing music and movies with other folks in our neighborhoods; the increased demand has led ISPs to make a lot of the bandwidth we use less costly for them.
Here's an idea: If Google determines that a particular ISP is throttling access to one of Google's properties, Google could post a message on the Google homepage aimed only at users from that ISP alerting them and giving them a phone number to call to contact their ISP to complain.
My guess is that most ISPs do no throttling outside of peer-to-peer filesharing.