Google turns up the heat on ISPs

There’s a certain ooh! factor every time Google pulls back the curtain a little further on their grand vision. Since the scatter-gun post-IPO spending spree, when their Cambian Explosion of product breadth made them the online Mitsubushi or Sony, Google has gotten leaner and more profit oriented, but without fundamentally altering their vision.

What they have done is stayed committed to a strict commercial outcome that they believe best satisfies their corporate goals of doing some good — providing easy, universal access to the world’s information, for starters.

Whether they’re correct in the longer term or not, I had to admire their release this week of an application designed to tell users if their ISP is throttling their bandwidth. A release heralded by none other than Vint Cerf, the “father of the Internet”.

The tool essentially shifts the balance of power between users and ISPs heavily towards users, giving them an easy way to benchmark one ISP’s services against another for things like streaming video, bittorrent and more.

Sweet.

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