Net neutrality has been the subject of considerable public debate over the past decade. Despite the potential impact on content providers and users, there is currently a lack of tools or data for stakeholders to independently audit the net neutrality policies of network providers. In this work, we address this issue by conducting a one-year study of content-based traffic differentiation policies deployed in operational networks, using results from 1,045,413 crowdsourced measurements conducted by 126,249 users across 2,735 ISPs in 183 countries/regions. We develop and evaluate a methodology that combines individual per-device measurements to form high-confidence, statistically significant inferences of differentiation practices, including fixed-rate bandwidth limits (i.e., throttling) and delayed throttling practices. Using this approach, we identify differentiation in both cellular and WiFi networks, comprising 30 ISPs in 7 countries. We also investigate the impact of throttling practices on video streaming resolution for several popular video streaming providers.
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