• Wired, Thursday, January 29, 2009 11:30 AM

Google on Wednesday upped the stakes in the net neutrality battle with ISPs by unveiling Measurement Lab, an open platform that allows users to identify problems with their Internet connection. M-Lab includes three publicly accessible tools. One, called Glasnost, tests whether BitTorrent traffic is being blocked or tampered with, another tests your connection's overall speed, and the last is a diagnostic tool that tells you if you're suffering from any speed barriers.

Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf says M-Lab was launched to help the academic community. "Unfortunately, researchers lack widely distributed servers with ample connectivity," Cerf wrote in a blog post. "This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another." M-Lab will help identify these problems.

Other tools in the M-Lab pipeline include DiffProbe, a network probe that will determine if your ISP is shuffling certain kinds of traffic onto a slower pipe, and Nano, a tool that tells you if your ISP is purposefully hampering traffic from a particular group, such as traffic from a certain Web site or computers that use a certain application.

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