11 ms·

Wehe – Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations

132 points by simonpure 6y ago

unnouinceput 6y ago
"Have you ever wondered if your Internet service provider is slowing down certain apps relative to others" Is this some sort of a US ISP problem that I am too Eastern European to understand?
- uoflcards22 6y ago
  Yes
- sodimel 6y ago
  It is listed in the "tools" page [1] on the Arcep website, which is french [2]. [1] https://www.arcep.fr/demarches-et-services/pour-tous.html https://www.arcep.fr/demarches-et-services/pour-tous.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_de_R%C3%A9gulation_des_Communications_%C3%89lectroniques_et_des_Postes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_de_R%C3%A9gulati...
- jonpurdy 6y ago
  From what I remember reading when Wehe came out, ISPs in Spain and Portugal (and Brazil?) were already providing data capped plans with options to uncap particular services for a small fee. So you'd get an (example) 100GB plan and pay $1-2/mo for each service you want excluded from the cap (Netflix, or whatever). IANAL but I'm sure this was/is legal in those jurisdictions, which indicates a total disregard for net neutrality there.
  - antonyh 6y ago
    So, I can have 100Gb of data for X or 100Gb of data plus all-I-can-eat from 'PopularService' for X+Y. If I choose to pay extra, that's my choice. Seems reasonable, after all it's my own bandwidth that I'm buying with my own money. It's dodgy if the ISP serves it at lower speed for either capped or uncapped. An ISP might throttle uncapped to force the service to use lower quality and less bandwidth, or they might throttle capped to encourage folk to pay for uncapped. It seems neutral at first glance, but the side effect is a barrier to market for competitors not on the ISP offers. As for legalities until it's tested in court it's hard to know if any law stands up to scrutiny especially in an area as grey as this. My gut feel is that ISPs would get away with it unless they are abusing a monopoly, but hey IANAL either.
  - Kaze404 6y ago
    This was proposed in Brazil, but was repelled due to backlash. Some ISPs still technically have data caps, but it's illegal to enforce them.
- yftsui 6y ago
  In the US most mobile carries will hijack your traffic, either slow it down(they call it whatever saver), or replace the data with their cache. I tried a T-Mobile MVNO or T-Mobile(?) phone a few years ago, noticed regardless whatever resolution I set inside the Youtube app, it is super blur on Cellular but it works fine on Wi-Fi. The I found that the carrier setup its own cache of low resolution youtube videos, it will hijack all your requests to youtube and replacing the content to its own cache (360p videos). That's how they give you "unlimited" data as you will never able to use it.
worldofmatthew 6y ago
If it is just checking for speed differences than it useless at checking for "Net Neutrality Violations". This is because Net Neutrality would mean treating all traffic the same. As bigger players use more bandwidth, if treated the same they will have congestion at peak hours as they use more bandwidth per visitor than smaller sites. For someone like Netflix to be as fast as a smaller website, they would need a peering arrangment that is special for them.
- 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
  Go read the methodology section: they're explicitly looking for ISPs that do packet inspection, not just speed differences from site to device.
- majormajor 6y ago
  This definition of net neutrality seems to rule out even offering connections with different speeds. If I'm paying for the 100Mb plan and someone else is on the 1Gb one, my downloads will be slower than theirs. And Netflix here would be making a deal for a really big pipe (oversimplification, obviously). I don't see a need for net neutrality to say you can't pay for more if you need more. I think "we're gonna charge you extra because of the TYPE of data you are" or "we're gonna charge you extra because we have our own competing service" or "we're gonna throttle you [for those same reasons]" are much bigger concerns. What's the big concern with Netflix operating as their own CDN vs paying a third party one?
teraku 6y ago
Amazing name choice ;-) It means "Don't you dare" in German
kurthr 6y ago
Wow, Android/IOS only! No PC options at all. Interesting choice, and perhaps a JS browser version wouldn't have worked properly. Maybe I'll try it, and maybe my PC VM would have caused issues, but doing a full mobile install is a big ask.
- OkGoDoIt 6y ago
  This appears to be specifically looking at cellular data, and cellular carrier’s tendency to throttle video services. It’s not a generic service to check generic ISP throttling. Perhaps updating the title might help. That being said, I have cellular data on my laptop and I’ve always been curious if it gets throttled the same way they throttle mobile, since I’m sure there some differences in the connection that may or may not fit the content filters the carrier has set.
aloknnikhil 6y ago
I'm not sure this works very well. I tried running the test on T-mobile's LTE which has free Spotify streaming. It basically said there was "no differentiation" implying there was no packet inspection? EDIT: Re-read the technical details. I think it can only measure one aspect of Net Neutrality I.e. Throttling one in favor of the other. Which seems reasonable. But I don't think it should be marketed as detecting "Net Neutrality Violation".
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
  tmobile still steals DNS requests to their weird search page? that alone would get them very low grades in my book.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Aways set your DNS, preferably to 1.1.1.1
    - gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
      Google won't allow you on non rooted android phones. > cue in google apologists telling me how to root or install hacks to do that and that it is totally possible
      - Toutouxc 6y ago
        How does it work? Does an Android on my WiFi just ignore the DHCP provided DNS, or..?
        grahamburger 6y ago
        They're forcing DoH, DNS over HTTPS.
      - isiahl 6y ago
        Just tested with my S9+ and could change my DNS settings
specialist 6y ago
I still don't understand "net neutrality". Further, reading other people's definitions and opinions, it feels like the pro and con advocates are talking past each other. Here's my current stab at understanding each side: Customer perspective: Rent seeking bad. Don't want to be gouged. Broadband providers perspective: Mitigate the free rider problem(s), make the system fair. Examples would be very helpful. Of course there are bad actors. I'm trying to not get sucked into that food fight. My hope is that we can curtail bad behavior (cheating) with better policies. Surely we can design markets to satisfy the needs and concerns of both sides. Right? -- Mea culpa: My bro created and runs the ISP portions of a cable company. He relates examples of their struggles. Stuff like spending millions of dollars on gear and having other companies abusing it. We pretty much don't agree on anything. But my bros examples and concerns are legit. So I've been trying to dig into his positions on net neutrality, to better understand the larger impasse.
- sologoub 6y ago
  Can you share more of what he considers abuse and any other sides of that story?
  - specialist 6y ago
    Of course. I'll try harder to ferret out my bro's grievances. Get some IRL details and not just his arm wavey stuff. Most of our policy discussions quickly devolve into partisan bullshit. It's a lot of work to keep convos on track. And when he talks about topics I do know about, a lot of the stuff he says (repeats) isn't even wrong. He is very good at his job, and knows the technical stuff cold, which is why I'm more open to his input on net neutrality.
- zeroflow 6y ago
  > Mitigate the free rider problem(s), make the system fair. Which free rider problem? The customer pays the ISP for access to the internet. I understand that the ISP would like to double-dip on this deal. But I regard this as wrong.
  - 6y ago
jdminhbg 6y ago
The Net Neutrality debate seems so quaint now. In January 2021, ISPs are pretty much the least likely level of the stack to interfere with who can be on the internet. Hosting companies, cloud providers, payment providers, and big media platforms are where decisions are made.
- undefined1 6y ago
  Right, the fear about Net Neutrality was largely directed at ISPs. That they would create fast lanes and bundle web sites like cable providers. I admit, I bought into that fear. But it didn't happen. Plus average US broadband speed has increased drastically, up 91% from 2019-2020[1]. Maybe big tech/media needs to ask themselves, "are we the baddies?" 1. https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe-internet-speed-analysis https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe-intern...
  - NDizzle 6y ago
    Yep. Great reply. Said it better than I would. NN went away in 2017. Reading the replies on reddit is troubling, thinking we need something that we actually don't. With plenty of data to back it up.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
joshuakelly 6y ago
Net neutrality seems like an irrelevant discussion now to anyone interested in "radical" internet models (read: anything that's not deeply entrenched in the client-server paradigm). Why should we care about the battles between corporate titans over how they treat each other? Frankly, I hope the ISPs and carriers are able to squeeze them, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
- __MatrixMan__ 6y ago
  Does it? I'm interested in radical internet models. I worry that without net neutrality we're on a gradual slippery slope towards an internet whose "slow lane" goes away entirely and I have to apply for a permit so that my IPFS node can be appropriately prioritized.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Maybe it is not so radical. The original, pre-web internet was not client-server. Each end of the connection potentially had something the other wanted. IMO, that's a truer representation of the real world. Today's internet is entirely web and mobile app centric, as if the world is nothing more than a feedlot, with only a small number of large-scale "farmers". https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/examples/cc/README.md https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/exa...
  - gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
    ironically, what you describe today happened because those central points were the ones producing the content (portals) that everyone wanted. Now that users produce the content, they kept the distribution and revenue model (i.e. you go to the central places and they sell you to advertisers) but they have zero cost for content since everyone is a producer and consumer, which was the use case for the non-centralized portals in the first place.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
      An astute observation. In an ideal "web" (as imagined in the 1990's), every business might have a website, there would be news sources[1], and many nerds would have websites, but beyond that, to the non-nerd, after a while, it's not very interesting. Despite what people once might have thought in the early-mid 90's, every living person is not going to create their own website. (Or even a blog, as people thought in the 2000's). The web is finite and that is bad news for search engines.[2] UGC and "social media" have been a way for certain companies to mask this truth. 1. As I remember it, news was one of the early internet centralisation points. As dial-up telephone charges were expensive, we patiently waited for someone at a large university to download the news and forward it. I am not a great source of internet history, others will may correct me here, but one of the largest operations like this, downloading Usenet news and making it available, ended up becoming what some called the first "ISP". That was UUNet. The takeway from this footnote is that "news" showed to be an early centralisation point, high traffic. Everyone wants "the news". 2. The trend today with Google and Bing, and those who use their feeds, is to limit the number of unique search results any user can retrieve. Around 250-300 max but with many searches one is lucky to get 50-100. The search engines are trying to market themselves as a way to "get answers" instead of a way to discover what websites exist on the web today. We all know what this looks like on Google and Bing. The companies place their own "web properties" in the results, i.e., many of the "results" are links to the companies own servers, and they scrape other websites to provide "instant" answers. The user never leaves the search results page, never even visits another website. DDG, following the lead of Google, calls this "instant answers" and "zero-click info". This statement from DDG sums up the present day popular search engines: "When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links." source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... (Personally I do want "just links". I have written scripts to get them.) It is up to the reader to decide whether this is intentional or not, but either way, unlike in the 1990's and early 2000's, search engines are limiting how much of the web users can actually "see" at one time. Regardless of intent, that is the effect. If, hypothetically, the web was not growing very much, no one could detect that using a search engine. The web today is portrayed by search engines as some sort of oracle that can provide answers. For easy questions, sure. For more difficult ones, we can fabricate answers but that does not mean they are good ones. Than add in "AI" hype. What happens when people lose all critical thinking ability. They just accept the oracle's answer as "good enough". We can already see this happenig with young people. You can end up with a Wizard of Oz scenario, but no one ever discovers the tiny man behind the curtain. The truth is that the web is still a motley collection of websites, along with some very large "walled gardens" of UGC that draw the lion's share of daily traffic.
entropea 6y ago
When I download games from Steam I can only pull around 25.5MB/s, but when I turn on my wireguard VPN I suddenly can pull 95MB/s from Steam. The same happens with Netflix because fast.com is throttled. Comcast ISP.
- nickphx 6y ago
  or the peering points that the netflix -> comcast traffic transits are under-provisioned and causing bandwidth contention.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
For some reason, I can't currently reach the web page -- but that doesn't matter -- THIS IS A GREAT IDEA... That is, this, and tools like this, are highly necessary, in other words...
- karlzt 6y ago
  https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/dd.meddle.mobi?proto=https https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/dd.meddle.mobi?proto=htt...
  - curiousgal 6y ago
    Works on mobile, doesn't work on PC.
chrisweekly 6y ago
Great idea! Interesting sources of support, too: > This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (CNS-1617728), a Google Faculty Research Award, Arcep (Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques et des Postes), Verizon Labs and Amazon. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, Google, Arcep, Verizon Labs or Amazon. © Copyright 2012-2021 by David Choffnes, Northeastern University.
kevwil 6y ago
I'd rather not know, because I have no reasonable alternative here. Stress management 101.
adamhearn 6y ago
Site appears to be down for me. Here is an archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20210122155540/https://dd.meddle.mobi/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210122155540/https://dd.meddle...
IncRnd 6y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20210122155540/https://dd.meddle.mobi/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210122155540/https://dd.meddle...
wdr1 6y ago
I can't tell if the site is down or blocked by my ISP?
paulwilson05 6y ago
I'm on Spectrum and cannot access this site.
- sli 6y ago
  Same with Frontier. I get PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR off my VPN and PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR when on my VPN.

132 points by simonpure 6y ago

"Have you ever wondered if your Internet service provider is slowing down certain apps relative to others" Is this some sort of a US ISP problem that I am too Eastern European to understand?

uoflcards22 6y ago
Yes
sodimel 6y ago
It is listed in the "tools" page [1] on the Arcep website, which is french [2]. [1] https://www.arcep.fr/demarches-et-services/pour-tous.html https://www.arcep.fr/demarches-et-services/pour-tous.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_de_R%C3%A9gulation_des_Communications_%C3%89lectroniques_et_des_Postes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorit%C3%A9_de_R%C3%A9gulati...
jonpurdy 6y ago
From what I remember reading when Wehe came out, ISPs in Spain and Portugal (and Brazil?) were already providing data capped plans with options to uncap particular services for a small fee. So you'd get an (example) 100GB plan and pay $1-2/mo for each service you want excluded from the cap (Netflix, or whatever). IANAL but I'm sure this was/is legal in those jurisdictions, which indicates a total disregard for net neutrality there.
- antonyh 6y ago
  So, I can have 100Gb of data for X or 100Gb of data plus all-I-can-eat from 'PopularService' for X+Y. If I choose to pay extra, that's my choice. Seems reasonable, after all it's my own bandwidth that I'm buying with my own money. It's dodgy if the ISP serves it at lower speed for either capped or uncapped. An ISP might throttle uncapped to force the service to use lower quality and less bandwidth, or they might throttle capped to encourage folk to pay for uncapped. It seems neutral at first glance, but the side effect is a barrier to market for competitors not on the ISP offers. As for legalities until it's tested in court it's hard to know if any law stands up to scrutiny especially in an area as grey as this. My gut feel is that ISPs would get away with it unless they are abusing a monopoly, but hey IANAL either.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  This was proposed in Brazil, but was repelled due to backlash. Some ISPs still technically have data caps, but it's illegal to enforce them.
yftsui 6y ago
In the US most mobile carries will hijack your traffic, either slow it down(they call it whatever saver), or replace the data with their cache. I tried a T-Mobile MVNO or T-Mobile(?) phone a few years ago, noticed regardless whatever resolution I set inside the Youtube app, it is super blur on Cellular but it works fine on Wi-Fi. The I found that the carrier setup its own cache of low resolution youtube videos, it will hijack all your requests to youtube and replacing the content to its own cache (360p videos). That's how they give you "unlimited" data as you will never able to use it.

worldofmatthew 6y ago

If it is just checking for speed differences than it useless at checking for "Net Neutrality Violations". This is because Net Neutrality would mean treating all traffic the same. As bigger players use more bandwidth, if treated the same they will have congestion at peak hours as they use more bandwidth per visitor than smaller sites. For someone like Netflix to be as fast as a smaller website, they would need a peering arrangment that is special for them.

35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
Go read the methodology section: they're explicitly looking for ISPs that do packet inspection, not just speed differences from site to device.
majormajor 6y ago
This definition of net neutrality seems to rule out even offering connections with different speeds. If I'm paying for the 100Mb plan and someone else is on the 1Gb one, my downloads will be slower than theirs. And Netflix here would be making a deal for a really big pipe (oversimplification, obviously). I don't see a need for net neutrality to say you can't pay for more if you need more. I think "we're gonna charge you extra because of the TYPE of data you are" or "we're gonna charge you extra because we have our own competing service" or "we're gonna throttle you [for those same reasons]" are much bigger concerns. What's the big concern with Netflix operating as their own CDN vs paying a third party one?

teraku 6y ago

Amazing name choice ;-) It means "Don't you dare" in German

kurthr 6y ago

Wow, Android/IOS only! No PC options at all. Interesting choice, and perhaps a JS browser version wouldn't have worked properly. Maybe I'll try it, and maybe my PC VM would have caused issues, but doing a full mobile install is a big ask.

OkGoDoIt 6y ago
This appears to be specifically looking at cellular data, and cellular carrier’s tendency to throttle video services. It’s not a generic service to check generic ISP throttling. Perhaps updating the title might help. That being said, I have cellular data on my laptop and I’ve always been curious if it gets throttled the same way they throttle mobile, since I’m sure there some differences in the connection that may or may not fit the content filters the carrier has set.

aloknnikhil 6y ago

I'm not sure this works very well. I tried running the test on T-mobile's LTE which has free Spotify streaming. It basically said there was "no differentiation" implying there was no packet inspection? EDIT: Re-read the technical details. I think it can only measure one aspect of Net Neutrality I.e. Throttling one in favor of the other. Which seems reasonable. But I don't think it should be marketed as detecting "Net Neutrality Violation".

gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
tmobile still steals DNS requests to their weird search page? that alone would get them very low grades in my book.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Aways set your DNS, preferably to 1.1.1.1
  - gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
    Google won't allow you on non rooted android phones. > cue in google apologists telling me how to root or install hacks to do that and that it is totally possible
    - Toutouxc 6y ago
      How does it work? Does an Android on my WiFi just ignore the DHCP provided DNS, or..?
      - grahamburger 6y ago
        They're forcing DoH, DNS over HTTPS.
    - isiahl 6y ago
      Just tested with my S9+ and could change my DNS settings

specialist 6y ago

I still don't understand "net neutrality". Further, reading other people's definitions and opinions, it feels like the pro and con advocates are talking past each other. Here's my current stab at understanding each side: Customer perspective: Rent seeking bad. Don't want to be gouged. Broadband providers perspective: Mitigate the free rider problem(s), make the system fair. Examples would be very helpful. Of course there are bad actors. I'm trying to not get sucked into that food fight. My hope is that we can curtail bad behavior (cheating) with better policies. Surely we can design markets to satisfy the needs and concerns of both sides. Right? -- Mea culpa: My bro created and runs the ISP portions of a cable company. He relates examples of their struggles. Stuff like spending millions of dollars on gear and having other companies abusing it. We pretty much don't agree on anything. But my bros examples and concerns are legit. So I've been trying to dig into his positions on net neutrality, to better understand the larger impasse.

sologoub 6y ago
Can you share more of what he considers abuse and any other sides of that story?
- specialist 6y ago
  Of course. I'll try harder to ferret out my bro's grievances. Get some IRL details and not just his arm wavey stuff. Most of our policy discussions quickly devolve into partisan bullshit. It's a lot of work to keep convos on track. And when he talks about topics I do know about, a lot of the stuff he says (repeats) isn't even wrong. He is very good at his job, and knows the technical stuff cold, which is why I'm more open to his input on net neutrality.
zeroflow 6y ago
> Mitigate the free rider problem(s), make the system fair. Which free rider problem? The customer pays the ISP for access to the internet. I understand that the ISP would like to double-dip on this deal. But I regard this as wrong.
- 6y ago

jdminhbg 6y ago

The Net Neutrality debate seems so quaint now. In January 2021, ISPs are pretty much the least likely level of the stack to interfere with who can be on the internet. Hosting companies, cloud providers, payment providers, and big media platforms are where decisions are made.

undefined1 6y ago
Right, the fear about Net Neutrality was largely directed at ISPs. That they would create fast lanes and bundle web sites like cable providers. I admit, I bought into that fear. But it didn't happen. Plus average US broadband speed has increased drastically, up 91% from 2019-2020[1]. Maybe big tech/media needs to ask themselves, "are we the baddies?" 1. https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe-internet-speed-analysis https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe-intern...
- NDizzle 6y ago
  Yep. Great reply. Said it better than I would. NN went away in 2017. Reading the replies on reddit is troubling, thinking we need something that we actually don't. With plenty of data to back it up.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

joshuakelly 6y ago

Net neutrality seems like an irrelevant discussion now to anyone interested in "radical" internet models (read: anything that's not deeply entrenched in the client-server paradigm). Why should we care about the battles between corporate titans over how they treat each other? Frankly, I hope the ISPs and carriers are able to squeeze them, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

__MatrixMan__ 6y ago
Does it? I'm interested in radical internet models. I worry that without net neutrality we're on a gradual slippery slope towards an internet whose "slow lane" goes away entirely and I have to apply for a permit so that my IPFS node can be appropriately prioritized.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Maybe it is not so radical. The original, pre-web internet was not client-server. Each end of the connection potentially had something the other wanted. IMO, that's a truer representation of the real world. Today's internet is entirely web and mobile app centric, as if the world is nothing more than a feedlot, with only a small number of large-scale "farmers". https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/examples/cc/README.md https://github.com/google/differential-privacy/blob/main/exa...
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
  ironically, what you describe today happened because those central points were the ones producing the content (portals) that everyone wanted. Now that users produce the content, they kept the distribution and revenue model (i.e. you go to the central places and they sell you to advertisers) but they have zero cost for content since everyone is a producer and consumer, which was the use case for the non-centralized portals in the first place.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    An astute observation. In an ideal "web" (as imagined in the 1990's), every business might have a website, there would be news sources[1], and many nerds would have websites, but beyond that, to the non-nerd, after a while, it's not very interesting. Despite what people once might have thought in the early-mid 90's, every living person is not going to create their own website. (Or even a blog, as people thought in the 2000's). The web is finite and that is bad news for search engines.[2] UGC and "social media" have been a way for certain companies to mask this truth. 1. As I remember it, news was one of the early internet centralisation points. As dial-up telephone charges were expensive, we patiently waited for someone at a large university to download the news and forward it. I am not a great source of internet history, others will may correct me here, but one of the largest operations like this, downloading Usenet news and making it available, ended up becoming what some called the first "ISP". That was UUNet. The takeway from this footnote is that "news" showed to be an early centralisation point, high traffic. Everyone wants "the news". 2. The trend today with Google and Bing, and those who use their feeds, is to limit the number of unique search results any user can retrieve. Around 250-300 max but with many searches one is lucky to get 50-100. The search engines are trying to market themselves as a way to "get answers" instead of a way to discover what websites exist on the web today. We all know what this looks like on Google and Bing. The companies place their own "web properties" in the results, i.e., many of the "results" are links to the companies own servers, and they scrape other websites to provide "instant" answers. The user never leaves the search results page, never even visits another website. DDG, following the lead of Google, calls this "instant answers" and "zero-click info". This statement from DDG sums up the present day popular search engines: "When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links." source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... (Personally I do want "just links". I have written scripts to get them.) It is up to the reader to decide whether this is intentional or not, but either way, unlike in the 1990's and early 2000's, search engines are limiting how much of the web users can actually "see" at one time. Regardless of intent, that is the effect. If, hypothetically, the web was not growing very much, no one could detect that using a search engine. The web today is portrayed by search engines as some sort of oracle that can provide answers. For easy questions, sure. For more difficult ones, we can fabricate answers but that does not mean they are good ones. Than add in "AI" hype. What happens when people lose all critical thinking ability. They just accept the oracle's answer as "good enough". We can already see this happenig with young people. You can end up with a Wizard of Oz scenario, but no one ever discovers the tiny man behind the curtain. The truth is that the web is still a motley collection of websites, along with some very large "walled gardens" of UGC that draw the lion's share of daily traffic.

entropea 6y ago

When I download games from Steam I can only pull around 25.5MB/s, but when I turn on my wireguard VPN I suddenly can pull 95MB/s from Steam. The same happens with Netflix because fast.com is throttled. Comcast ISP.

nickphx 6y ago
or the peering points that the netflix -> comcast traffic transits are under-provisioned and causing bandwidth contention.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

For some reason, I can't currently reach the web page -- but that doesn't matter -- THIS IS A GREAT IDEA... That is, this, and tools like this, are highly necessary, in other words...

karlzt 6y ago
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/dd.meddle.mobi?proto=https https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/dd.meddle.mobi?proto=htt...
- curiousgal 6y ago
  Works on mobile, doesn't work on PC.

chrisweekly 6y ago

Great idea! Interesting sources of support, too: > This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (CNS-1617728), a Google Faculty Research Award, Arcep (Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques et des Postes), Verizon Labs and Amazon. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, Google, Arcep, Verizon Labs or Amazon. © Copyright 2012-2021 by David Choffnes, Northeastern University.

kevwil 6y ago

I'd rather not know, because I have no reasonable alternative here. Stress management 101.

adamhearn 6y ago

Site appears to be down for me. Here is an archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20210122155540/https://dd.meddle.mobi/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210122155540/https://dd.meddle...

IncRnd 6y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20210122155540/https://dd.meddle.mobi/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210122155540/https://dd.meddle...

wdr1 6y ago

I can't tell if the site is down or blocked by my ISP?

paulwilson05 6y ago

I'm on Spectrum and cannot access this site.

sli 6y ago
Same with Frontier. I get PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR off my VPN and PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR when on my VPN.