The FCC recently established new rules to prevent ISPs from selectively degrading your connection to certain services, like some have done in the past. This tool, from Fight for the Future, can check to see if this type of degradation is happening to you.
The tool checks your connection to different locations throughout the internet that are outside your ISPs own network. This helps determine whether there are choke points between various networks designed to slow down your connection. This type of slow down famously occurred when Comcast throttled Netflix in order to negotiate a higher fee.
On its own, the test can give you a decent idea of how consistent your connection speed is. However, the organization also puts the data from all users’ tests together to get a birds’ eye view of ISP activity. With enough people testing their connection, Fight for the Future hopes that we can see which companies are responsible for bottlenecks that violate net neutrality principles more easily.