Archive notice: This article was originally published on June 17, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
According to Roger Whitt, Senior Policy Director at Google, the company intends to promote net neutrality in this way, IT portal The Register reports. “Neutral networks are a fundamental prerequisite for the development of innovative services and applications on the web,” Whitt said during a discussion at the university in Santa Clara.
Google’s applications are intended to make providers transparent, according to the programs’ stated objective. Whitt did not, however, provide further information on a release or technical details. “In any case, we want to give our users tools that allow them to examine their DSL connection and determine what is happening with their access,” Whitt promises. “They can then let their providers know if they are dissatisfied with the result or believe that certain web services are being manipulated.” Google is not the first company to offer such software. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems recently developed a Java applet that detects P2P throttling in networks.
Whitt justifies Google’s ambitions by saying that ISPs do not pursue transparent corporate policies. The search-engine operator will therefore take on this task, Whitt says. Users in the United States in particular have become sensitized since the file-sharing restrictions imposed by U.S. provider Comcast became public. Several months ago, file-sharing companies, including BitTorrent, accused Comcast of deliberately throttling P2P traffic. Under pressure from the FCC, the U.S. provider eventually tried to demonstrate greater transparency in its network policy. It published a catalogue of rights for providers, P2P companies, and users and promised to abandon its previous practice.
Providers repeatedly cite the burden on networks as an argument against file-sharing traffic, while P2P companies insist on equal treatment for all users and sharply criticize restrictions. Net-neutrality policy has not yet reached its limits, but data-intensive services are continually increasing. In the future, it may be important precisely here to assign priority classes to certain time-critical data. Otherwise, services such as web TV or video on demand could encounter problems delivering content.