IMO this headline is a little inflammatory; the (mostly unenforced) ban on servers is a pretty small carve-out. Also note that the NN people haven't been complaining much that every consumer broadband plan also bans servers.
What's more, from a technical standpoint, it's different for a fiber provider than for a cable company. Coax cable capacity is asymmetric. It can carry only a given amount of data and they can carve it up to give you more down and less up, equal amounts, or more up and less down. Obviously most users want fast downloads and aren't as concerned about uploads.
By contrast, fiber is symmetric, offering full capacities up and down at once. So while cable has a technical justification for "service levels" to offer a server, fiber providers do not. Google Fiber is 1000/1000 Mbit/s symmetrical. Forcing the consumer to not use the idle uplink is against consumer generated content and consumer ownership of their own content, for the sake of a "differentiated business plan". It's against the democratization of consumer created content that consumers can control themselves.
(Google has dogs in that hunt too, you "should" host your content on G+ or YouTube, and host your email on Gmail, rather than drop in a Mac Mini Server or "host any type of server" at home.)
FWIW, my $50/mo residential plan doesn't ban servers, even though the company offers business plans from $200/mo up. I can host a mail server and a web server, with dynamic DNS and open ports 25 and 80. Ports >1024 are open for all classes of service, even their lowest.
Finally, I think the point here is that other consumer broadband providers weren't lobbying for network neutrality. Telcos weren't, cable wasn't. Google was.
It feels a bit icky when "don't be evil" turns out to mean "for now ... until we have an offering in that area that enough people adopt and this practice we used to actively call evil turns out could make us more money and is actually good ... for us".
Mind you, being magnanimous until they own enough customers is an excellent strategy. They just need a different slogan and to quit with the flip flopping.
Link symmetry is a property of the datalink protocol and service provisioning, not the physical media.
Many, if not most, FTTH deployments use PON which delivers asymmetric bandwidth that is shared among a number of users. GPON delivers 2.488Gbps down and 1.244Gbps up and is typically shared between 16 and 64 users.
Seems to be some debate about it:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27731107-Google-Fiber-Lates...
If it's not real fiber networking, then yeah, same asymmetric song and dance as cable.
But see pages 10 and 11 of this Google PDF explaining why they might as well use symmetric point to point:
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...
It says end run to users is the ultimate future proof approach and a costs negligible amount more.
If they didn't go that way, well, I am disappointed.
Even with Active Ethernet (the industry term for dedicated run of fiber to each subscriber) you likely still have a bandwidth constraint somewhere, be it at the switch uplinks or border routers so some level of oversubscription is a given.
Right now FTTH networks are getting away with some pretty wild oversubscription ratios since content and consumption are lagging. From what I've seen on my network residential traffic tends to interleave pretty well as it is really bursty. Business traffic tends to a constant during the work day so can't interleave as many business customers. It will be interesting to see what Google Fiber charges medium & large businesses.
Incidentally, as this is about hosting one's own servers, early on I wrote the first (as far as I know) dynamic DNS for dial-up users, so when you connected to a Portmaster and auth'd via RADIUS, your username.isp.com got pointed to your dynamic IP, allowing you to host over dialup under your own name. Customers even ran their own mail servers at home since SMTP was happy to wait for them to dial in. I believed in user publishing then and still do today.
From day one competitor telco ISP services (and telco backbone links) were so oversubscribed it felt immoral. Sorry to hear that's still not changing.
Google Fiber is an experimental / policy altering service, its TOS as this point in time is inconsequential.
Reselling is prohibited, any kind of "professional use" is prohibited, but they don't say anything about servers.
Besides, the reason nobody hosts servers on personal connections is that the upload speed is terrible, not any sort of legal/contractual thing.
Yes, they have. In fact, the bans imposed by other broadband providers were the key motivation for NN folks. (Including the FCC commissioners that included the neutrality provisions in the Open Internet report and order.)
Right now, many NN advocates are yelling louder about Google because Google was on their side until very recently, and now is taking the exact opposite position.
You could replace a lot of stuff with plug-in-and-forget devices on a very fast connection - dropbox, email provider, personal web hosting, etc.