ISP Accountability: Tracking Throttling & Blocking

Ending Net Neutrality means we are now the ones that have to hold ISPs responsible for abuse and anticompetitive behavior

Now that Net Neutrality rules have been overturned by the FCC it is upon us, the consumers, to monitor and track abuse from our Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Currently there are not many tools for tracking throttling, blocking or abuse by providers and the tools that do exist require some tech savviness.

I have been recording statistics on my current Internet Service Provider for a while now. My method is pretty simple. I use a command-line tool for tracking basic bandwidth and I write the output to a CSV files. I also have a simple script for performing a ping for a few different pre-selected sites. These all run many times per day allowing me to keep pretty good tabs on my available bandwidth throughout each month and if any sites seem to be loading noticeably slower over time.

Download and Upload results from speedtest-cli performed every hour between December 12th, 2017 and January 13th

My simple methods are not extremely accurate and do not account for the many complexities that go into calculating response times. This is why we need to come up with better tools in order to be able to reliably track throttling by ISPs.

Firstly we all need to start such tracking in order to ensure fair service from our ISPs. Overall we need to develop better tools for monitoring our networks for abusive behavior from our providers. This is key to ensuring that the lack of Net Neutrality rules have minimal affects on the Internet marketplace.