Measuring the Internet for Everyone

Idea

In 2008, Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet,” began a series of conversations with Internet researchers to learn more about challenges they faced while trying to study Internet performance. Researchers identified several problems, including a lack of widely deployed servers with ample connectivity to support internet measurement experiments. They also reported an inability to easily share large data sets with one another. There was no public resource that could provide combined performance data to policymakers or to consumers interested in understanding their Internet performance over time. As a result of these conversations, Measurement Lab (M-Lab) was founded to help address the core problems experienced by researchers and to promote large-scale open source measurement of the internet.

Incubation

M-Lab was founded in 2009 by New America’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google, and a group of academic researchers. It was created as an open source project with contributors from civil society organizations, educational institutions, and private sector companies dedicated to providing an open, verifiable measurement platform for global network performance; hosting the largest open internet performance dataset on the planet; and creating visualizations and tools to help people make sense of internet performance.

Impact

M-Lab has become the largest open source internet measurement effort in the world, performing more than 2 million measurements a day by the time it celebrated its tenth anniversary. M-Lab provides internet measurement tests that help consumers develop an accurate picture of their internet service by offering a state-of-the-art server platform. The data are collected and then released to the public for use by policymakers, researchers, and others who are interested in internet issues. New America is proud to have hosted that growth before M-Lab spun out in 2019 to join Code for Science and Society.