This is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons. No one person feels the impact of abuse, but ends up ruining it for everyone.
Clearly they didn't intend for this service to be a general backup system.
Clearly they didn't intend for this service to be a general backup system.
While I can understand and agree that fair-play should be a part of the service, if the offer on hand is Unlimited, then it is not abuse to upload tera-bytes, peta-bytes, exa-bytes or even zetta-bytes.
Amazon is hardly a neophyte as far as understanding big data, they are very well placed to know that offering unlimited storage could actually attract really big chunks of data.
And on the other side, many of the more extreme users of drive probably aren't new to storing a lot of data and knew that Amazons offer had to be unsustainable when used to much and thus would disappear in some way.
I'm not particular sympathetic to either sides messaging here. It's sad that rclone got caught in the middle of it.
But they don't want to do that, apparently. Why? I don't know, but it looks like they're worried some of their customers (the same ones they don't like because of excessive usage) will go over to B2 or whatever other cheap services are available, for the peace of mind of not running into any caps even if the service costs more at 2TB or 5TB worth of storage. "Unlimited" storage companies, that nevertheless discriminate against very high usage, want to have their cake and eat it too. Either state a limit and accept the risk that some of your customers decide to go somewhere else, or don't limit and don't discriminate against them. Those are the reasonable choices. Other choices are not reasonable.
while (1) { for user in userlist {
# Top .01% of users are abusive and we boot them
if usage_distribution_top(user, .0001) {
disable_account(user);
send_acctdisabled_notice_to_user(user, "Excessive usage of unlimited storage");
}
} sleep 1; }
If the concept isn't clear to some people, the problem is this: You can't repeatedly cull the outliers — the top x% of the distribution — because by culling you shift the distribution to create more outliers.
I'm sure businesses recognize that, intuitively if not explicitly in their planning meetings, and therefore cull rarely enough that it doesn't impact the bulk of users (in part due to influx of new users). So you cull the top x%... who decides what x is, and why, if you state in your promotional material that the service is unlimited? "If we set x to .001% and cull monthly, it'll help our bottom line. Those users are scum data hoarders anyway and we won't serve their kind with our 'unlimited' storage service." That should be lawsuit-worthy.
Companies in this situation should be forced to specify a fixed usage limit (exactly what these companies don't want to do), or live with the outliers.
They don't create a running list of the top X% of usage and ban those users. They study their customers usage for some period and find the top X%, then translate that to a fixed upper limit. Then they punish anyone who goes over that fixed limit. If their customers or technology changes, they can re-calculate that number.
As far as "unlimited": marketing is full of bullshit words that don't mean what you think they mean. Courts (no wait, its all company-paid arbitrators now) unsurprisingly favor the companies.
When the Supreme Court sided with AT&T on the binding arbitation clause, no joke I got an email from Charter Communications the very same day the ruling was released that said they updated their terms of service to include binding arbitration.
If the limit is dynamic and periodically re-evaluated, then you run into the "there's always an outlier" problem.
If the determination isn't dynamic, and Snake Inc. advertises its service as 'unlimited' instead of stating the limit, and then starts discriminating against users or tools associated with higher usage, and get a reputation of being a snake in addition to actually having an undisclosed cap, what then? They'll not only lose their high-end customers to other services (which apparently they don't want or they could have disclosed the limits to begin with), but as already mentioned they also hurt their reputation, because whatever the courts say, people are not happy when an unlimited service actually discriminates against high-usage customers.
But it also true that if you offer something unlimited you need to add reasonable limits / throttling so that pathological and cheater do not destroy experience of others.
Amazon Drive might be able to bandwidth limitation for users which are abusing the system but as I far as I understand they just route things to Amazon S3 so bandwidth limitation is probably hard for them. Also they probably do not want to add bandwidth limitation for people who use Amazon Cloud Drive for photos and movies. Not 100% sure but I understand they position.
And I read on redit how people started moving data to Google Drive thinking everything will be super fast - but Google already have bandwidth limitation in place.