Re: Google begins effort to find Internet blockers

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net>
Date: January 28, 2009 8:44:58 PM EST
To: dave () farber net, "ip" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Google begins effort to find Internet blockers

Dave, and everyone:

As I've mentioned in an earlier message, there are several "testers"  
out there which purport to discover whether an ISP is conforming to  
various people's ideas of "network neutrality." (Most of these,  
including the ones mentioned in the article, are listed at http://www.eff.org/testyourisp#projects.)

Unfortunately, none of these applications was designed by anyone who  
is actually in the business of supplying broadband service. And they  
are limited in their ability to produce valid results by several  
factors. Among other things, they tend not to play well with NAT  
routers, caches, and unexpected network architectures (such as the  
innovative, proprietary architecture which we at LARIAT use to  
optimize traffic flow). For example, with the "NDT" program (which was  
announced in the press today, but has actually been available for  
longer; we've tested it), we see reported bandwidth far below what the  
user can achieve on simple uploads and downloads. And for some reason,  
we can't get some of these programs to produce any results at all on  
our network. (We haven't analyzed the source code to find out why,  
because some of the source is unpublished and some is GPLed. We won't  
look at GPLed code because we're professional programmers and cannot  
afford to be accused of making derivative works.)

Finally, most of these programs, by their very nature, slander ISPs by  
asserting that there's something wrong when an ISP blocks an attempt  
to violate the terms of service to which the user has agreed (for  
example, by setting up a server on a residential connection) or  
prevent hogging of bandwidth.

I'd thus have to advise users to avoid these programs. They were  
created with an ideological, rather than a scientific, purpose in  
mind, and are not well enough crafted to discover what our company --  
which believes in disclosure -- will gladly tell our users about our  
traffic management policies.

--Brett Glass





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