Google has awarded $1 million to Georgia Tech researchers so that they can develop simple tools to detect Internet throttling, government censorship, and other "transparency" problems.

That money will cover two years of work at Georgia Tech, with an additional $500,000 extension possible if Google wants an extra year of development. At the end of the project, the Georgia Tech team hopes to provide "a suite of Web-based, Internet-scale measurement tools that any user around the world could access for free. With the help of these tools, users could determine whether their ISPs are providing the kind of service customers are paying for, and whether the data they send and receive over their network connections is being tampered with by governments and/or ISPs."

Wenke Lee, a computer science professor at the school and one of the grant's principal investigators (along with the grant's author, computer science professor Nick Feamster), says that the work will create a "transparency ecosystem" on the 'Net.

"For example," he said, "say something happens again like what happened in Egypt recently, when the Internet was essentially shut down. If we have a community of Internet user-participants in that country, we will know instantly when a government or ISP starts to block traffic, tamper with search results, even alter Web-based information in order to spread propaganda." (The Tunisian government early this year added bits of code to Facebook login pages in order to capture user credentials, for instance.)

The team cares about more than computers, too; with the surge in mobile data connections, it plans to build tools for smartphone and tablet owners as well.