Laruen Weinstein has posted a proposal for the deployment of a distributed global Internet traffic measurement system. Aimed at moving past the current impasse over whether their should be government regulation aimed at network neutrality, the system would measure “operational bandwidth, throughput, and other parameters of public Internet traffic” so that norms could be established and deviations from those norms could be discovered, measured, investigated, and debated.
I find it a sensible idea, and am willing to forgive his proposal’s bias toward legislation. The establishment of norms and a system for swift public exposure of deviations will be enough to harness ISPs to the interests of the Internet-using public, without the sclerotic influence of regulation.
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