Codex Perductum

I previously blogged about a presentation that Cory Doctorow gave on campus. One of the points that I made to him during the presentation and then blogged about was that fighting for net neutrality is a waste of time:

"My prediction is that this fight is going to disappear because it's already lost. The net is not neutral any more. There was never any law saying it had to be. Let it go. We would be better off finding a way to publicly and objectively analyze the service from different providers."

It appears that Google is tacitly agreeing with me. They have recently announced that they are developing tools to identify when carriers are biasing your traffic based on relationships formed with other companies. So now, by using Google's forthcoming tools, consumers can compare the services provided by different providers and decide if having super fast access to ESPN is worth super slow access to to your favorite independently hosted blog.

" We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let [ISPs] know that they're not happy with what they're getting -- that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google senior policy director Richard Whitt said this morning during a panel discussion at Santa Clara University, an hour south of San Francisco.