Juan Monroy

Take the Internet Health Test

The Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, has been on a populist mission lately. Not only has he essentially banned the daily fantasy sports sites from New York state, he was also been an advocate for access the Internet. Earlier this year, he hired Timothy Wu—the professor at the Columbia School of Law, coiner of the phrase “network neutrality,” disenchanted United Airlines passenger, and author of one of my favorite books on media technologies—as a special advisor on “technology, competition, and internet policy and legal issues.”

The New York Attorney General’s office is asking the public to test its broadband speeds to determine whether customers are getting the advertised speeds to all network services.

The test measures the connection to several different CDNs to determine whether those connections are “healthy” enough to be considered “network neutral.” If a connection to a particular CDN is consistently too fast (or too slow), it could lead investigators to learn whether an ISP is deliberately accelerating traffic to its partners or debilitating the throughput as an anti-competitive measure.

Unlike voting, you are encouraged to take this test frequently to help provide the AG’s office with more data on the health of those connections.

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