Google working to make the Internet more transparent

A big (if you're a geek) announcement from Google today:

When an Internet application doesn't work as expected or your connection seems flaky, how can you tell whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP, the application, your PC, or something else? It can be difficult for experts, let alone average Internet users, to address this sort of question today.

Last year we asked a small group of academics about ways to advance network research and provide users with tools to test their broadband connections. Today Google, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers are taking the wraps off of Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform that researchers can use to deploy Internet measurement tools.

Basically, Google is working to help the general public diagnose the hidden problems that creep up with the Internet network. I plan to dive into his a lot further, but for now here are some of the tools that have already been made public as a result of this effort:

• Network Diagnostic Tool: Test your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed.

• Glasnost: Test whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled.

• Network Path and Application Diagnosis: Diagnose common problems that impact last-mile broadband networks.

• DiffProbe (coming soon): Determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic.

• NANO (coming soon): Determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.

Exciting!

Update: I'm even more impressed with how much attention this is getting in the blogosphere. Most people are focusing on the BitTorrent aspects of this, but still, a lot of press for transparency movement: