If you support net neutrality 鈥� the principle that all data packets routed around the internet should receive equal priority 鈥� soon you could help the cause personally by donating your spare computing power.
Imitating the popular SETI@home project, which harnesses 150,000 home computers worldwide to help search for signs of alien life, a group of politically minded bloggers and techies is planning to enlist a similar army of PCs to monitor the net for non-neutral data routing. Each PC would use its idle power to test whether broadband providers are deliberately slowing data down.
US broadband providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, which ferry data packets along fibre-optic cables, have recently started selling services such as video and voice-over IP (VOIP), sparking fears that these companies could slow down data packets from competing providers such as YouTube and Skype. However, there is currently no way to monitor whether deprioritisation is actually occurring, and a US Senate committee recently rejected draft 鈥渘et neutrality鈥� legislation that would outlaw deliberate 鈥減acket deprioritisation鈥�, in which packets get bumped down the transmission queue (www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9435.html).
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Deliberate deprioritisation is hard to detect because there is always a chance packets can be shunted to the back of the queue non-maliciously when there is heavy traffic, says Tom Evslin, a technology consultant based in Stowe, Vermont. His solution is to use the distributed approach to single out deliberate deprioritisation.
Each volunteer would download software that triggers their computer to send out test packets called pings to various websites. Because pings automatically trigger a return packet, they can be used to measure the speed of a connection between two computers. Each probe PC reports its results to a central server that can then work out from all the ping times whether packets from certain websites are being deprioritised, and if so by which broadband providers, says Evslin. He outlined the idea at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 8 August.
