Thursday, January 29, 2009

Google takes a step towards free market net neutrality

In the ongoing net neutrality saga, Google has traditionally been the biggest proponent of legislative action forcing net neutrality onto ISPs and consumers (some wavering notwithstanding). But just recently they've released some easy online tools that negate a key argument for net neutrality: ISPs are often not very transparent with their policies on network neutrality (i.e., when they de-prioritize BitTorrent and things like that, they aren't usually upfront about it). Of course, ISPs can still try to hide the truth, but now that it's so easy to test for these things, consumers are inevitably going to wind up better informed.

Just another way that the steady beat of progress in a free market can upend problems that at the moment we only see legislative solutions to.

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