Testing for Net Neutrality

Law.com reports on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's new software that can tell you whether your internet browsing issues are due to intentional ISP interference. More info on EFF's Test Your ISP project here.

The San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes the program, released Wednesday, will help uncover "data discrimination" -- efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services -- in addition to the cases reported separately by EFF, The Associated Press and other sources.

"People have all sorts of problems, and they don't know whether to attribute that to some sort of misconfiguration, or deliberate behavior by the ISP," said Seth Schoen, a staff technologist with EFF.

The new software compares lists of data packets sent and received by two different computers and looks for discrepancies between what one sent and the other actually received. Previously, the process had to be done manually.

Schoen compared the software to a spelling checker.

FAQs on net neutrality from savetheinternet.  [JJ]