Am I being throttled? Yep.

(Note: I am sick as a dog with the flu, and trying to do something productive by editing and rolling out a few drafts from the past months that never made it to fully-gorwn posts.  Please forgive any grammar atrocities while I type through the fever.)

If you need any more help getting riled up about net neutrality, check out the new M-lab (Measurement lab) tools to see whether you are being throttled!  Cool!  Just last October I was at an Info Policy conference bemoaning the fact that there were no tools easy enough for lay users to manage that would tell us whether we were being throttled.

According to their “Who We Are” page,

Measurement Lab was founded by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google Inc. and academic researchers. M-Lab was developed in 2008 after Vint Cerf and others at Google initiated conversations with network researchers to learn more about challenges to the effective study of broadband networks.

I tried it out and it worked for me.  Of course, it’s no surprise, since my ISP is one of the many that already disclosed to the CRTC that they “traffic shape,” and we have noticed what has seemed like undue congestion while trying to stream video in the evening hours, but now I know for sure: I AM being throttled.  My deep packets are being inspected.  Hrm.

How about you?  Throttled much?  Try it out and let me know, if you have the chance.

On the Search Engine podcast (#19) from back in February in which they discussed the M-lab applications that allowed me to verify this, Jesse Brown tried to get Google to admit that they were trying to egg people on into taking action against throttling ISPs.  The Canadian Google representative on the air demurred, but I think it’s brilliant, and it’s working on me.  I want to go submit my comments to the CRTC’s traffic shaping consultation all over again. (<–Hold that thought…)

–Greyson