Mountain View, California-based Google has launched an effort called Measurement Lab that is aimed at making it  easier to measure how Internet Service Providers manipulate subscriber Internet connections, Google chief evangelist Dr. Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol that underlies the Internet, announced Wednesday. Internet traffic will initially be analyzed at data centers in 12 locations in Europe and the United States on 36 computer servers provided by Google, in an effort that has already begun operating and which was to expand throughout early 2009. Detection Of ISP Bandwidth Manipulation A Key Goal Of Google Effort With Measurement Lab, which is also known as M-Lab, Google, academic consortium PlanetLab, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute -- both organizations that Google helps to support -- along with academic researchers, have unveiled a platform that can help consumers determine whether ISPs such as Comcast, Cox Communications or Charter Communications are blocking or slowing portions of their Internet connections, Google said. "Today Google, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers are taking the wraps off of Measurement Lab, an open platform that researchers can use to deploy Internet measurement tools," noted Cerf, sometimes referred to as a "Father of the Internet" because of the major role he played in the global network's creation. "All data collected via M-Lab will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on," Cerf and Google principal engineer Stephan Stuart wrote in a joint message posted to the Google blog on Wednesday announcing the Internet traffic analysis platform. Cerf and Stuart wrote that M-Lab could be used to help determine "whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP, the application, your PC, or something else" interfering with Internet traffic. "Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they're getting when they sign up for broadband," Cerf and Stuart added. Likely To Bring Renewed Focus To Network Neutrality Debate The M-Lab platform announcement came as the latest salvo in a network neutrality battle that has over the past several years increasingly pitted ISPs against businesses that rely on the Internet to provide services to their customers. Researchers who have lacked the type of widely-distributed servers with ultra-high speed connections needed to accurately measure how ISPs manipulate data throughput over the Internet are expected to benefit from the new M-Lab platform, said Google, which hired Dr. Cerf after he left a position as chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in October 2007. "By running these tools, users will get information about their connection," Cerf and Stuart noted in the Wednesday blog message which described three tools still in development but presently available through the Web site of the Measurement Lab effort. "To start, three tools running on servers near Google's headquarters are available to help users attempt to diagnose common problems that might impair their broadband speed, as well as determine whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled by their ISPs," Stuart and Cerf noted. The M-Lab platform began to take shape in 2008 when Google and a group of academics examined the difficulties researchers attempting to accurately analyze global Internet traffic faced, at a time when some ISPs began testing or implementing Internet traffic throttling systems targeting what they have called bandwidth hogs. Vinton Cerf Says Google Effort Welcomes Interested Organizations Harkening back to the early days of Internet access, which was often billed using either metered pricing or hourly fees, Dr. Cerf warned last year that volume caps could stifle growth of the Web and "end up creating the wrong incentives for consumers to scale back their use of Internet applications over broadband networks." Google said that it welcomed organizations interested in helping the M-Lab platform with its task of "sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation." "We welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish," Stuart and Cerf noted Wednesday. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has offered a project with similar goals in mind but with a smaller scope. The EFF said Wednesday that the Google M-Lab platform "will save researchers from having to deploy their own servers in order to run 'active' network tests," and that the Measurement Lab platform would "provide server resources for researchers interested in network neutrality and performance testing." Cox Communications Announced New Traffic Management System The M-Lab platform is a variation of an existing PlanetLab network managed by a consortium based at Princeton,  the EFF said in a message posted Wednesday to its Web site. U.S. ISP giant Cox Communications said on Wednesday that it planned to begin testing an Internet delivery system that could delay or slow certain types of data communications while giving priority to those that it considers to be the most time-sensitive. Comcast said that it will not give priority to Internet traffic based on where data coming to a subscriber originated in cases where it imposes communications delays. ISPs have looked to data throttling techniques to limit what they view as Internet traffic that strains their own existing network limits, despite subscriber concerns that accounts often touting "unlimited" access should not be subject to anything less than the maximum transfer speeds and bandwidth they signed up for. Google Launches Measurement Lab Internet Traffic Analysis Effort In August 2008 Cerf suggested ISPs use transmission rate caps to manage increasing network traffic rather than systems that impose volume caps and over-usage fees, as SearchEngineWorld reported at the time. "Rather than a volume cap, I suggest the introduction of transmission rate caps, which would allow users to purchase access to the Internet at a given minimum data rate and be free to transfer data at at least up to that rate in any way they wish," Dr. Cerf noted at the time. Plans such as the one Cox announced Wednesday are fraught with potential dangers, according to some industry  analysts. If broadband providers are allowed to choose which applications receive the fastest latency, they could find themselves "in the business of picking winners and losers in the market under the rubric of network management," Dr. Cerf warned last year. The three tools available Wednesday on the new Google M-Lab site included a “Network Diagnostic Tool” for testing Internet connection speeds, an application called "Glasnost" for detecting blocked peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic such as that generated by the popular file-sharing program BitTorrent, and a low-level broadband connection diagnostic tool. Forthcoming tools from M-Lab will aid researchers and broadband subscribers alike in determining whether ISPs are targeting certain groups of people who use various Internet applications, all tests likely to prove problematic to ISPs if they become popular through the backing of Internet giant Google. Related Links:
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