The Life of Matt Campos

In the latest Google corporate blog post the company it is helping to put tools out to allow the normal internet user to take his or her ISP to task. The latest set of tools is an effort in co-operation between academia and Google. What Google is doing is allowing the research universities to use Google’s massive infrastructure to test and develope tools to see if ISPs are blocking or throttling certain types of traffic.  Measurement Lab or M-Lab is a suite of tools being developed across the globe to do things like check to see if your ISP is blocking or throttling your torrent downloads. Other features touted in the blog post are allowing users to   “measure the speed of their connection, run diagnostics, and attempt to discern if their ISP is blocking or throttling particular applications.” With these new tools Google is taking the Net Neutrality fight directly to the ISPs. Before tools like these the normal user had no idea if their ISP was blocking any types of traffic. Hopefully with Google behind these tools it will shift how our ISPs think about us, the normal user.