What has Glasnost done?

I think there might be something very interesting going on in the days/weeks/months after Google and Measurement Labs released a set of tools to help people find out if they have a throttled connection – when it comes to peer to peer service. I’ve seen it reported that in Alberta, both Telus and Shaw throttle connections, but then last night, after using the Glasnost test and watching the results from others over twitter, it seems that neither service is being throttled with this caveat from the test:

Note that some ISPs do not throttle all BitTorrent traffic but only if this traffic exceeds a certain threshold. Thus, passing our tests does not necessary mean that there is no throttling occurring on your link.

So does that mean that the test isn’t vigorous enough (this test is a few months old and has been suggested to be unreliable)? Or are ISPs going to be neutral for a while until this meme blows over? I’m thinking it might be more the later than the former. But thinking about the former – I don’t know how intense the test is, but if it simulates your “typical” P2P user, then there might be an interesting point to consider – is there such a thing as “partial net neutrality”?

I like the idea of data being free and that as a commons, users of broadband connections should not take more than what they need or distub the ability of others to make use of the resource. It certainly seems that those ISPs passing the test might be subscribing to this idea. So if it is the case that only the abusers are those who are getting throttled, and the average-heavy users are able to use the utility as they see fit. The way I’m thinking, it might very well be the abusers who are shifting their ports around (ala the torrentfreak suggests), and the rest of the population, downloads their client, on the recommendation from a peer, installs it and starts to download the show that they missed or a copy of a DVD/BD that they were not able to backup before Jr used it as a skateboard (and of course there are others who will go after those files that they might not have “rights” to go after). Is this really that bad?

Of course there are ISPs that fail the test totally, suggesting that they are not subscribing the to the idea of a commons, and those groups are not being neutral. But those that pass these tests, may be “neutral enough for most of us… and is that all most of us might want or need?