Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers”
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It's there to prevent abuse of your otherwise unlimited gigabit connection for only $70/month to run a filesharing website on that saturates the connection 24/7/365. If you want to use Google Fiber for business use, pay for their business plan, simple as that.
EDIT: Seems a few people are missing a key detail. When you buy a personal Google Fiber plan, you're not paying for an unmetered 1Gbps upstream/downstream fiber connection. You're paying for an unmetered 1Gbps upstream/downstream connection for personal use. (https://fiber.google.com/legal/terms.html).
There are services that will sell you purely unmetered, unrestricted bandwidth, but it won't be Google Fiber, and it won't be for only $70/month.
Google is simply continuing the tradition of making sure your users consume. If they are creating, they are not spending time looking at and clicking ads.
"We are currently focused on our Fiber-to-the-home network, which is for residential consumers. For businesses located in qualified fiberhoods, we plan to introduce a small business offering shortly—stay tuned to google.com/fiber for more details."
Marginalizing home servers perpetuates an insipid consume-only Internet usage model. The Internet I'd prefer to see is one where serving and consuming are both first-class features for all.
[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft (section 5)
Using the term "server" is open-ended and it gives ISPs unnecessary discretion over cutting users' connections. If the rationale is that customers whom are operating commercial businesses out of their home internet connection are abusing their internet connection, then put the goal-post there.
Using the term "server" allows ISPs to change the goal-post when its convenient for them, and that's unfair.
Also, a moving goalpost isn't really unfair at all in this situation (Assuming it is, in fact, a moving goalpost). They have every right to make changes to their network to ensure good quality service to everyone.
ETA: If you're going to downvote, you should explain yourself.
There is the problem.
Can I run a server from my home?
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged.
Maybe it is clear to some lawyer somewhere, but it is not clear to me, the consumer.
This shit is vague. It may be clear to you, but it isn't categorically.
Edit: OK I'm not really in a Google Fiber area, but I do pay for Comcast "business" internet for my house. I currently use about 5x more data than their residential cap allows, for 1.2x the price.
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and
encouraged.
So, thanks for telling us that your TOS doesn't actually mean what it says, but no thanks for not actually telling us what it does mean.
Or how about a similar thing for email. Your email remains on a machine in your home, but you can access it from anywhere. Uptime should be pretty much always.
Or how about a commercial scenario? You realize your employer has huge overhead, and that you could undercut their price and offer your skills directly to customers over the Internet. So you start using your home Internet connection to do business. Not running a server, but violating the noncommercial usage policy. Running a business connection would just artificially replace your employer with Google and raise your overhead until it matched the employers, protecting the entrenched centralized business model (which the Internet should be destabilizing and destroying).
e.g. If someone uses the service to download & upload 100gb+ of data a day, and somehow it's actually for personal use, I suspect that Google would restrict them.
If so, the spirit of the terms isn't as much to delineate between types of use as much as it is to delineate between amounts of use.
This bandwidth is oversold. Of course it's oversold. 1000 Mbit of Internet connectivity costs a lot more than you're paying Google for it, never mind the last-mile cost of connecting your home. You can't seriously expect to run a business on a residential connection sold at residential prices, right? Like it or not, this has been the status-quo since the earliest days of broadband in the late 1990s.
Now, that said, Good Guy Google would give every Google Fiber customer a GAE instance on which to run their servers. By doing this, they move the servers to network infrastructure that's actually designed for running servers.
I don't believe in restricting what a customer can do with their connection to internet, but I also don't want to someone to consume more resources than they are reasonably paying for.
In my ideal world, I want to sell a connection to the internet that is as fast as I can reasonably deliver. I don't even want to make the distinction between 100Mbps and 1Gbps. I don't want speed to be factor. Just fast.
Is there a better way to phrase the service offering instead of 'unlimited'?
When I read this back to myself, it sounds like I want to have my cake and eat it to. Lots of contradictions in my mind.
Your first off-peak gig per month costs X USD whether you use it in one day or 28, et cetera.
That's how all utilities are measured, and it's totally reasonable, I just wish it didn't have to be that way.
How does everyone feel about metering in general?
The power costs per GB sent/received are negligible, the money goes towards maintenance of the network and ethernet cable doesn't degrade based on how many bits pass through it. If too many people utilise the network, then just throttle them and start dropping connections from the more aggressive ones.
Perversely, I would be perfectly fine with you dropping my connections if I try starting 100 parallel downloads or charging me the same whether I download 1GB or 100GB this month, as long as it's a nice flat reliable fee.
Edit: about "that's how all utilities are measured". They aren't. Road tax is flat, but I can drive on the road for as long as I like as fast as the rules permit. Except it's slower when too many people do it at once. I want my internet to be like a road. (disclaimer: maybe road tax isn't flat where you live, but it is in many parts of the world, so please imagine we're talking about them for the purpose of the analogy. you may also need to pay a higher tax to use the highway, but it's still flat. it may also vary per type of vehicle but it's still flat.)
I wouldn't. Never interfere with my packets (except dropping when buffers are too full, of course). Throttle me to 1mbps if you need to, but you shouldn't even know how many TCP connections I have open.
I guess we're saying mostly the same thing, just worded differently.
In the case of electricity (etc.) there's an actual amount of work that goes into each KWh and that's what you pay for. With internet, there's just the upfront cost of connecting a router and paying a sysadmin team to support it; after that, operating it is a flat cost no matter how many packets pass through it.
You have to dig fibers at some point - at a cost of ~$15-100 per meter.
Feel free to join my "unmetered" internet. I've connected my routers via 56k lines to eachother, but we never even throttle a single customer. Of course given the chances of even a single packet ever reaching it's destination are so low you probably shouldn't even bother connecting to the network at all ...
Wouldn't that be solved with a simple ticker giving you the current spend. This way you wouldn't have "overage" charges that suddenly leap up, your spend would match usage, watch one more movie and it will cost you a small fraction extra to what it cost last month when you watched 23 movies, say.
Not all utilities are measured, domestic water is often unmetered FWIW.
"You pay X/mo up to Y MB; after Y MB you pay Zc/MB." Set Z to be slightly more than what you pay.
I think most people understand that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Don't promise one; just promise an honest pricing scheme that lets you make reasonable amounts of money and gives your customers what they want.
- X Mbps guaranteed, unmetered, do whatever you want (including servers). X here is not oversold: you need to have enough bandwidth for everyone to use the bandwidth you've sold them simultaneously.
- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, X TB/month (pay more if you use more), do whatever you want (including servers). Here, the minimum Mbps is the non-oversold level, and the burst takes advantage of available bandwidth that others aren't using. You need the transfer limit here to prevent a small handful of users saturating their ports and crowding out all other users; if they want to do that, they can pay for it.
- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, unmetered, best-effort based on the usage of other customers, ToS-limited to the types of activity that won't continuously saturate all available bandwidth (e.g. no continuous torrents beyond the minimum Mbps, no high-traffic servers). Here, you're not charging for additional bandwidth, but you're also telling people not to run anything that will saturate more than the amount you're guaranteeing them. Your remedy for users violating the ToS is to limit them to only the guaranteed bandwidth, effectively moving them to the first type of connection.
The first two options are standard with business-class Internet connections. The third option is what consumer Internet connections normally offer. You could offer a hybrid of the first and third options, where you can use X Mbps continuously for anything you want, but only burst to the full port speed intermittently.
- Xup/Ydown MBps for connections within the country (i.e. ones for which we can guarantee the infrastructure)
- X2up/Y2down MBps for connections farther away (i.e. subject to more variables)
- If you exceed N simultaneous TCP sessions, we reserve the right to drop some of them when the network is under load.
Basically, see how much you're getting from your provider and in how many pieces you can slice it and how much it will cost to buy fatter pipes when you have more users.
Give mid-bounds for speed - tell the customer their speed is usually this, but might be less under very heavy load (rare) or more when the network has spare capacity. But do sell slower/faster connections. This way you can sell better connections more expensively to people with more money.
Never put limits on how much data a user can down/upload. That is limited by their speed.
Make sure your equipment won't die if someone really does start an http server and posts the link on /. with "an experimental raspberrypi http server that can serve 100k simultaneous connections; do your worst :)".
Basically, I want my connection to have low latency, 99.999% reliability and you want me to pay as much money as I'm comfortable.
The only way you could sell flat rate unrestricted internet service is to increase the price and force your most profitable users to subsidize your least profitable users (biting the hand that feeds you). Bandwidth usage based metering would help fix this, but there is an extreme aversion to usage metering among even low usage customers.
From a (former) network engineer's standpoint: people who are upset that they can't keep their $50/month 20Mbps connection at line rate 24/7 make me think of people who want to fill shopping bags at a buffet.
Some people have bigger [data] appetites than others. Would you be in favor of a rule against fat people or really wired skinny people? And the shopping bag analogy is rather broken: if you were paying for 24/7 access to a buffet it wouldn't matter if you walked out with extra food to eat yourself.
(I'm ignoring any kind of food/bandwidth resale, I don't object to that being outlawed by the TOS.)
A fat person may eat 2-3 times what a normal person does. Not 10,000 times. The analogy is about abusing normal expectations. You are trying to make it fit too tightly. If you really want to extend it to 24/7 access to a buffet it would mean taking up all the plates/silverware so no one else can eat there. Then becoming indignant when asked to leave 'you said it was unlimited!' But I have no desire to play analogy ping pong.
Someone that uses a lot of bandwidth isn't doing it to be a jerk. And if they inconvenience others the network is frankly set up badly. Normal users will saturate a connection some of the time, and networks need to handle it. And if a network can handle saturation for one hour without problems, it can handle saturation all the time without problems.
Which is why they should be legally forbidden from advertising that they are slling 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth.
How hard is that? Don't advertise what you're not selling. When you say "unlimited use 1GB synchronous connection" and that's not what you're selling? That's illegal. It's called false advertising. Sure no one gets nailed for it any more, but that doesn't make it right. Advertise that you are actually selling a "restricted 1GBit synchronous connection with limits on what ports you may listen on, limits on upstream use, limits on what applications you may use on the network", etc.
Many ISPs offer "up to XX Mb/s" with no caps. In the event of unsustainably high use by some customer, that customer might have their maximum speed lowered to ensure the network quality of other customers.
It's impossible to provide unlimited data anyway, because the maximum amount of data per month is bounded by (length of month * permitted data rate)
They're not advertising that. The closest thing they say on their web page is "no data caps," which doesn't imply that you can use the connection to run any service you please. Besides, I'm willing to bet that they have more detailed terms of service that must be agreed upon before receiving service.
We know they don't mean that, and they know we know they don't mean that, but I don't think we should let companies get away with lies like that just because everybody's used to the lying.
edit: Wow, down-voted for out pedanting the pedants. That's some cognitive dissonance there.
What, if anything, does this mean to you?
But I believe ISPs should be forced to publish in detail what their acceptable use" thresholds and limits are, and ban advertising any connection as "unlimited". Otherwise consumers have no way of accurately comparing the offers. "Unlimited but we can ban you for an unknown amount of heavy use" is designed to avoid competition via confusion.
An ISP I used was very clear about it: 100Mbit max speed, but you are throttled to 5Mbit after 3GB of traffic during 4-8pm each night.
And internationally, where we are dependant -mostly- on undersea cables, the capacity just isn't there.
What? They absolutely can do that.
"It's unlimited as long as you don't try and use it all the time!" What a load of bullshit.
I'm surprised the EFF were expecting Google to maintain a higher standard than other ISPs, especially since revelations that Google allowed the NSA a backdoor into every system.
sorry, what?
Tl;dr: Google allowed the NSA unrestricted access to every Google service. No legal challenges were made.
citation, please
What makes you believe one report over the other?
Larry Page has every reason to lie; probably enforced by the US government. The fact Google are operating within the law doesn't mean anything when such open-ended laws as the patriot act exist.
So, Googler, Tell me why you are convinced that Gmail is highly secure and my email is not being snarfed by the NSA?
Why can't they say what they mean in their TOS, instead of falsely advertising "unlimited"?
Why do they care about the content of the bits or why I am sending them?
"Gigabit Internet, in short bursts, and only if you are using your connection like a consumer (as we define the term)!"
I guess that does not have quite the same ring to it...
Let's also ban them from advertising a "mail" service, because they should also have to specify the exact nature of the POP3/IMAP/SMTP service provided right there in the headline, along with all the fair use restrictions.
This is asinine pedantry. Nobody is mistaking Google's residential and business Internet connection offerings. The terms and conditions are clearly stated, and it's fairly obvious to users if they are breaching the fair use policy.
Most people find bandwidth charges by the gigabyte distasteful, hence no payments based on that. Don't run a warez ftp site on your personal connection and you will be fine. Worried you might be hitting their upper limit of usage on what their definition of "personal use" is? Fine then just start out of the gate by paying more for business class. It is really straightforward.
I know what "server" technically means, but Google is explicitly not using the technical definition of server.
I'm not using an 'ignorant mode'. Google's TOS is thoroughly broken until they provide some definition of the word server.
Let's define server as something that is going to be using up enough traffic/bandwidth to get you noticed and degrades service for someone else on your network segment. That could be saturating your connection 24/7 on a network segment that is heavily utilized, or not even an issue if you live in Bumville, Nowhere.
This is something which will never be technically spelled out because it is all about context.
Right now I seriously have no idea if a legal, non-commercial instance of apache averaging 50kbps and peaking at 5mbps is going to violate their rules or not.
If they said it had to be enough bandwidth to affect others then I could breathe a sigh of relief that I'm fine.
How are you going to ensure you aren't bothering others? They aren't going to give you access to their NOC so you can view their TP99 performance and see if you are a culprit. This service could be not anything to worry about in network segment A, but a large issue in segment B. It can't be broadly defined as a simple flat metric and apply to every neighborhood in the country.
If you are worried about the case above I think the choices would be: Buy a personal connection, run your service and worry about running afoul, don't run your service and be happy with a personal connection, run your service with a business account from the start and don't be worried.
I'm assuming some basic levels of competence and a reluctance to flat-out lie when I complain about a provision that can be used to boot people on a whim.
I shouldn't need a business account unless I want a better service level or I'm running a business.
That's the problem. I have no clue whatsoever if it would violate their TOS. The TOS is so vague as to be meaningless when it comes to figuring out if a noncommercial use is banned or not.
Whether a rule is vague is not binary. They can leave themselves some wiggle room while still providing rules that can be understood.
Your Google Fiber account is for your use and the reasonable use of your guests. Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection, use your Google Fiber account to provide a large number of people with Internet access, or use your Google Fiber account to provide commercial services to third parties (including, but not limited to, selling Internet access to third parties).
If that isn't good enough for you I guess either buy business class and be happy you are in compliance, or don't.
>Your Google Fiber account is for your use and the reasonable use of your guests. Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not
Okay, introduction.
>host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection,
Server is not defined. It says 'any type' but this is blatantly incorrect, as the FAQ says you are permitted game servers, videoconferencing serving, etc.
>use your Google Fiber account to provide a large number of people with Internet access,
Okay no subleasing, that's reasonable and clear.
> or use your Google Fiber account to provide commercial services to third parties (including, but not limited to, selling Internet access to third parties).
That all falls under commercial, fine.
Note that nowhere does it actually explain what I can and can't do non-commercially. It only says a single thing is banned, 'server', but server is somewhere between not-defined and incorrectly-defined.
The commercial restrictions are clear. The restriction against using the household internet on more than a household or so is clear. The restrictions on what you can do non-commercially are insultingly vague.
Are you hosting a personal file server that shifts ~20GB/month with the odd FTP connection, or a major website shifting 1TB/month with thousands of concurrent HTTP connections?
If Google sells me 1gbit up/down, then I should be able to use 1gbit up/down. Pretty simple to both understand and enforce. But it's not about their network capacity - it's about forcing me to buy the more expensive business package, so I can then do exactly that thing they didn't want me doing before.
It's a violation of network neutrality. They're caring which bits get sent, not the total sum of bits.
If you want a truly unlimited connection, buy a truly unlimited connection. They cost a lot of money.
The Internet is not a network where some nodes have different capabilities from others, or at least it was not supposed to be. This is not some ITU standard that favors large monopolies on communications service. All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned. TCP does not discriminate between "business" and "personal" computers.
This, of course, is what makes the Internet such a fantastic system and the reason that the Internet overtook all those online services we used to use. I doubt that Google could have gotten started if the Internet were designed any other way.
This is clearly untrue. Just look at DOCSIS (Cable Internet). If everyone on your block is streaming netflix at the same time you all suffer, which is why some people complain about speed during peak hours.
This is simply the case that the architecture being laid out to consumer is designed for specific use cases.
Simply put, the economics simply don't make sense to give everyone in the neighborhood the ability for 24/7 1Gbps. It doesn't make sense because your grandma, won't max the connection 24/7, however she would still like for her Netflix movies to download quickly. So its been decided upon that ISP-x will only put $10 million rather than $20 million so that everyone can enjoy 1Gbps internet, just not 24/7 and all at the same time. If you do need this type of connection, then get a business class connection where you do have these guarantees, and the extra money you pay goes into making sure the infrastructure can meet your demands.
However, at the end of the day it doesn't make sense to charge everyone more, for the needs of what must be 1% of the population. Remember for the most part this isn't used to stop you from SSHing into your home computer. This is stop people from using the connection in a perverse way from how it was designed. Its a simple engineering tradeoff.
0. http://gigaom.com/2013/06/17/having-problems-with-your-netfl... 1. https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect
This is exactly why it wouldn't be very expensive. Because almost nobody is actually going to use 324TB/month, so if some small minority does, it raises the average monthly bill by some small number of pennies. Conversely, if it turns out that large numbers of people are experiencing an unexpected pent up demand for massive amounts of bandwidth, prices go up until supply and demand meet, which is how the market is supposed to work.
And nothing stops the person who only wants email while 50% of the other users want to participate in some kind of P2P holographic video chat system from subscribing to the 10Mbps package rather than the 1000Mbps package and paying correspondingly less.
But then you have monthly payments which vary, potentially wildly. I can move into your neighborhood and probably triple your bill within a month. This is bad for the vast majority of users. The demand for it would almost certainly be very low. Virtually nobody is going to want to share the bandwidth costs with their neighbors and virtually nobody is going to want 24/7 throughouts of any speed.
And speaking of markets, what about the demand for low-cost, high-burst but transfer-limited connections? I would guess that to be the product in the highest demand, based both on average non-tech-savvy users, and even bigger users like myself. And, lo and behold, that's what the vast majority of home Internet plans are (all the ones I've heard of). Note that I'm not suggesting that we truly have anything like a free market when it comes to telecoms, but in this case, I feel like supply is meeting demand quite well.
It doesn't make any sense to allocate costs by neighborhood. If you have single digit numbers of heavy users in the entire country then you can amortize that cost over millions of people and it will be minimal. If you have millions of heavy users then the all you can eat plan will cost more as it ought to.
> And speaking of markets, what about the demand for low-cost, high-burst but transfer-limited connections?
So we're getting back to the real problem here. The problem is that number of bits transferred is monumentally disconnected from the overall cost of operating a network. It costs the same amount to dig a hole to put a wire in regardless of the number of wires you put in it or the number of bits they ultimately carry, and that is the predominant cost of being able to transfer bits. Guys in trucks digging holes for wires and putting them back on the poles when the weather knocks them down. Paying for land taken through eminent domain. Employee compensation, property insurance, backup generators, idle power consumption, equipment depreciation. They're all fixed costs that don't change with the number of bits you transfer and they dominate the cost of operating a network.
So now you have a pricing problem. There are a couple of different "straight" pricing models. The first is you charge everybody a fixed monthly fee and let them transfer whatever they want. Someone who only transfers 50MB per month is still getting the benefit of men in trucks fixing downed wires 24/7 and access to the call center for support etc. etc., so they have to pay their fair share of that, which dominates the cost of the network and makes flat rate pricing sensible. The fact that they don't transfer very many bits doesn't make it any less expensive to dig up their street.
The second alternative is to charge exclusively by the byte. This is a preposterous failure. The problem is that, because the people who only transfer 50MB per month would be paying approximately zero dollars, but you still have to cover the cost of the line workers and accountants that service them, the cost per byte would have to be extremely high so that the heavy users pay enough to make up for the light users paying almost nothing. And this immediately snowballs because 90% of the heavy users aren't going to continue to be heavy users if they have to pay $2000/month to make up for twenty light users paying $5/month, so they turn into light users and then the price per byte has to go up to make up the revenue. Repeat until the price per byte is so high that even the light users are back to paying ~$50/month again but now you've destroyed the market for any services that require a significant amount of bandwidth and your customers hate you for charging a dollar for an email attachment.
So you can't charge solely by the byte, why not come up with some hybrid of the two and try to thread the needle? Charge a fixed monthly fee for turning on the pipe and then charge a "reasonable" amount for transfer on top of that. The fail is how much. The cost of putting twice or ten times as many strands of fiber in the ground when you already have the hole open is negligible compared to the other costs of operating the network. If you allocate based on that cost then the price per GB is going to be in the fractions of a penny. The pricing model ends up being de facto equivalent to a fixed monthly fee because the additional cost per byte would be so low.
But this is looking at all of this like a regulator -- someone who wants to maximize social utility. That's not what ISPs actually want to do. They don't want to put a hundred stands of fiber in the ground, even if it only costs 1% more in total than putting ten, because it eliminates "valuable" scarcity and reduces their ability to engage in price discrimination. Enterprise customers are willing to pay a lot more for the exact same piece of wire than a residential customer because the enterprise gets more value out of it and has more money. That has nothing to do with the cost of providing the service and everything to do with who has deep pockets. So they come up with a pricing model that will stick it to the enterprise and extract the $XXXX/month the enterprise is willing to pay, hence "no servers" and transfer caps etc. etc. because enterprises want to run servers and transfer a lot of data. Not because it costs the ISP that much more, but because that class of customers is expected to have more money.
That isn't what you want from a policy perspective at all, because the price discrimination is too blunt. Small businesses are less able to pay the "enterprise" rates so you drive them out of business in favor of larger companies. Software developers who want to encourage end users to run things that would be considered "servers" or would transfer a large amount of data get pushed out of the market because their customers on residential connections aren't allowed to do it. Meanwhile users are uselessly encouraged to "conserve" bandwidth even though unused hardware capacity can't actually be saved for use later, which wastefully reduces the benefit users receive from their connections. (The fact that not using unused transfer capacity is wasteful is hard for some people to wrap their heads around, but think about it. It's like "saving" perishable food by not eating it before it expires.)
Even if you like the idea of enterprises paying more than residential customers, distorting the market like this is not the way to do it. You could get a much better result by e.g. taxing telecommunications usage by corporations with more than 1000 employees and then using the money to subsidize connections for everybody else.
This is a greater problem about the limits on a egalitarian Internet. In the Great Firewall/SOPA/NSA/Mega-scandal world we live in, it is fundamental that users should be able to share content from private, ordinary connections. This is what the Internet was about, remember? People sharing information, not "people uploading information to Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Apple/Twitter".
Decentralization is the Internet's greatest strength.
The language in the contract doesn't bother me. Comcast has that language, I run my own web server, and they've never hassled me about it.
Let us know when/if Google Fiber starts enforcing this contract term against people running servers for casual/personal use.
Nor does using/having/needing/running a server imply business use.
For example: I run my own email server from my basement. Who uses it? Me. Maybe my dog... but mainly just me. Yes, it is technically a server, so yes technically my ISP could shut me down... but with a daily throughput of what, 10mB? I doubt it.
If the "unlimited" connection really isn't unlimited, the contract should spell out reasonable use limits. It's as simple as that.
Google's contract actually goes much further than preventing servers. It says "You agree not to misuse the Services. This includes but is not limited to using the Services for purposes that are illegal, are improper, infringe the rights of others, or adversely impact others’ enjoyment of the Services." The definition of "misuse" is completely up to Google.
That said, I think it's reasonable to limit it to personal use - especially if that extends to your 2nd degree friends.
We're facing a very near future where MOST employees could out-compete their employers by going independent and selling their skills online. The ban on servers guarantees this can never happen to any degree that threatens the status quo. If it did grow to that scale, ISPs would just force such people to get business connections, meter their traffic and estimate the persons revenue, and raise their prices so that an independent worker would have the same overhead as a company that has to maintain a physical building, executives, etc, etc.
Instead of trying to separate different "kinds" of usage, they should just separate different amounts and traffic patterns. Want a connection you can saturate 24/7? Pay more. Want something suitable for "personal use"? It's going to have some sort of cap.
That's how most products I buy are sold, whether physical products or services. The electric company doesn't sell me electricity "for personal use". The water company doesn't care if I'm taking a shower or selling car wash services. The grocery store treats me exactly the same whether I'm buying supplies to cook tonight's family dinner or supplies to make sandwiches I'm going to sell. I fill up my personal car next to commercial trucks at the gas station, and there's no "personal/commercial" option at the pump.
The real problem, in my opinion, is a bizarre prevailing environment where "unlimited" service is somehow expected of ISPs. Attempts to actually charge for use encounter huge resistance from the tech community. But they can't actually provide unlimited service at the price they charge, so they end up with a ton of weird rules to limit service instead of just charging heavy users more.
Charge a reasonable price per gigabyte, and problem solved. People who want to saturate their connection all day can do so, and will pay accordingly. Light users pay less. It works out for almost every other product and service in the world!
Personally, I find it asinine that setting up my own personal cloud server on a premium internet service is a ToS violation.
Intent doesn't matter. Violating terms of service is a crime. Enforcement at ???'s whim.
"Violating terms of service is a crime"
In which country?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/rebooting-computer-cri...
My friends and I were in college and taking lots of IS/CS classes. I had a personal apache server running to test a variety of things. I never once gave anyone a link to it - it was 100% for personal amusement and learning.
I had a 500k SWF video on it (which was creative commons) a few splash pages and whatnot, and that was it. The ISP was actively scanning their network for "servers" and came across mine. They played the SWF video from their office over the wireless backhaul. The video had ONE play (I kept the logs and attempted to give them to the ISP). I served ~505k, total. They turned off our internet connection and sent us a letter and bill of "overuse and abuse". They claimed we had uploaded 50mbps and were hosting illegal content and not abiding by our contract which said "no servers".
While the main moral of the story is that ISP has complete morons running it (I uploaded 500k for a few miliseconds topping out at 50mbps in their eyes; funny thing was it was a 5mbps wireless backhaul), but this isn't a small ISP (Surewest) and they were actively scanning my connection for open ports, and then manually looking through content that they found on open ports (they admitted that!).
The central objection raised to it is that it is banning a specific set of applications, in apparent direct contravention to the FCC's Open Internet Report and Order (for which Google actively lobbied) which requires providers of fixed broadband services to permit customers the use of any legal applications and devices on the network.
There is discussion of whether it falls within the scope of the reasonable network management limitation to that requirement, but given that all of the examples given in the Report and Order suggest that that exception is appropriate when various mechanisms of imposing in a use-neutral manner on the quantity of traffic to assure fairness among users of the same service when faced with load that, if all demands were met, would saturate the network, it doesn't look on its face like its an obvious candidate.
In fact, that's basically what started the entire Net Neutrality debate. Comcast got busted messing with the bittorrent protocol, got slapped by the FCC for it, but then got the rules overturned in court. These new rules replace the old principles.
And the new rules are clear: if you are selling broadband, you allow any legal service, application or device.
If something is messing with the network, deal with indvidual user on a protocol-independent basis. If a kind of protocol is congesting the network, like say streaming video, then you may throttle ALL kinds of streaming video, inlcuding your own.
Simple principles that Google used to believe in.
And Google doesn't get to ignore the rules and escape criticism just because Google Fiber is cool. Principles matter.
"When you rent a car from Hertz, you're not paying for an unmetered vehicle to take you all around the region. You're paying for a vehicle to drive around in town and to and from the airport. It doesn't matter if this isn't mentioned in any of the advertising material or at the rental counter."
There's nothing special about server traffic. Bits are bits, and if you're advertising certain bitrate for a certain price, deliver that or advertise something else.
I personally use servers.
The main point of contention appears to be that the EFF is defining "server" as any process that opens listening sockets, while ISPs use definitions based more on traffic patterns and uptime requirements.
Google's FAQ addresses this issue. From https://fiber.google.com/help/ :
Can I run a server from my home?
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged.
For example, it would be obviously bad for Comcast to place Netflix at the bottom of the QOS stack, but perfectly reasonable to do so with Bittorrent.
All residential ISPs sell more aggregate consumer capacity than total peering capacity, because very few users require the full use of their connection at all times. This permits their users' bills to be much lower, a tradeoff that is obviously beneficial to almost everyone.
Overprovisioning absolutely requires the use of QOS and throttling. If my neighbor decides to torrent a hundred terabytes of ATLAS data, that should (ideally) not cause any of my DNS or RTP packets to be dropped.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
ISPs should stop overprovisioning if it prevents them from being neutral to my packets.
What do you mean by it?
This definition permits traffic shaping based on content, such as dropping bittorrent packets to preserve dns/rtp latency on a link shared between customers.
I don't care how "normal" it is for ISPs to discriminate traffic and how "every ISP does this" (no, it doesn't). It's just not acceptable.
The TOS says "no servers", it doesn't say "non-commercial use' only.
Can I run a 1Gpbs upstream feed from my Kittycam to a million non-paying subscribers?
Maybe they're drawing a clear line at "legal and non-commercial"?
"non-commercial purposes"
They explicitly don't allow commercial purposes. But that's not the full list of what makes something a banned server.
What is the full list? Hell if I can figure it out.
Or are we talking about something a little more fine-tuned: Using the listening ports of a computer on the network to facilitate the selling of goods/services for commercial reasons.
Is a business license the limiting factor? We need clearer terms before any argument has merit here.
Sounds about right. We can take it a step further and explicitly state that a customer is prohibited from living on the avails of their residential internet connection, rather than simply "facilitating the selling of goods/services for commercial reasons."
Too many things can be considered "facilitating."
The problem, though, is that the EFF's definition is the "correct" one at least as commonly understood by technical people. The license is using the term to connote things that it doesn't define, and that's a frustrating place to be if you as a user want to know if your gadget is permitted.
The linked FAQ is a great clarification, and Google should be commended for adding it (they may be alone among broadband ISPs in having language like this, I don't know). But they really need to get that clarity into the license itself.
https://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2659981?hl=en&topic=...
"Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection ..."
In terms of "knowing better" is there any company that would be in a better position to understand the nature of servers and infrastructure?
The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
I would have no problem if they put bandwidth caps, as long as they were articulated. I can totally understand if someone is jamming petabytes, but those are gigabit connections. What constitutes abuse?
Is it possible that Google jumped into the ISP world without fully understanding the magnitude of the problem? I think of ISPs as another fractal problem, like email or calendars. From 100,000 feet away, it looks simple, but the details of running very large networks are surprisingly complex.
To be clear, my position is that calling a service unlimited and then throttling using intentionally obfuscating criteria is unconscionable. If you're going to throttle me, let me know what the terms are. Pretending a "server" is automatically a giant mainframe like device is the kind of ignorance I expect from the DOD not Google.
When you go to a restaurant they will serve you free water and give you free napkins. If you asked the waitress how much water you were allowed to have she would probably say "as much as you want". This does not mean you can connect a hose to their water supply and start selling the water. You can not pull up with a large truck and start unloading boxes of their napkins because you can have "as much as you want".
There are common sense limitations on unlimited services, and I do not think google is crossing any lines here.
What is not reasonable is saying "you can use your bandwidth for this, but you cannot use it for that". This is what people are complaining about.
If Google doesn't want people to use unreasonable amounts of bandwidth they should just say so. There's no need to use words like "server" in their TOS, because in the best case it just makes things complicated and vague.
That's how the real world works, isn't it?
I'll add that anyone who expects the product "inside the box" to be exactly what they see "on the box" is going to have a bad time.
This is pretty much exactly the argument I'm hearing from people that think Google is doing a terrible thing here.
Then you find out that there are potatoes in many of the dishes, though only one is all potato. Does the rule apply to those dishes? At what point does it become a potato dish? Remember, eat the wrong one and you might get kicked out.
Up to 12 dishes is not a acceptable advertisement for such restaurant, but why is it acceptable for an ISP? Should such restaurant, beyond being allowed to do as the ISP, also be allowed to have a TOS where limitation is put down? Maybe forbid athletes to eat anything above 300G, or its "for commercial purpose".
Of course those companies miss the point of the Internet. Those companies do not really like the Internet anyway, with its neutrality and the philosophy of "all nodes created equal."
Now, we should expect better from Google, given Google's origins...
This seems obvious if you are used to the Internet, but there was no technical reason things had to be made this way. Look at a modern cable TV system: that is a computer network too, and if you have a digital cable receiver then you have a computer connected to such a network. You cannot run your own cable channel just because you have a connection. Your receiver is a different kind of node than what is at the head end; head end nodes are allowed to transmit video, receivers are only allowed to receive video and make on-demand requests (and a few other things, none of which include transmitting video).
> It refers to the capabilities of an Internet-connected
> computer to communicate with other computers.
There is no indication that Google Fiber, or any other major ISP, is planning to ban incoming connections. The TOS does not ban users from replying to SYN.
I will also note that phone networks are just as node-egalitarian as the internet. In a typical phone network, any endpoint may establish a circuit to any other connected endpoint. Saying that Verizon expects its users to be consumers because they sell phone service is incoherent.
They operate on a shared model, with definite over-subscription built in to their network design.
However if they allow ports 22,80,443 traffic, then really they are winking at it - basically "use it but don't abuse it in a way that will cause us to make more rules about it" .
edit: I suggest everyone just read the wiki on Net Neutrality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Definitions
One is a piece of paper and the other is network technology. Can you guess which is which?
The point of net neutrality is that any Internet connected computer should be able to communicate with any other Internet connected computer, without having to pay surcharges or extra fees, without limitations on protocols, directions, purpose, content, etc. It makes no difference if you are being restricted by a contract or by a technical system. If you are unable to host servers using your Internet connection you are not enjoying net neutrality, regardless of why you cannot host servers.
Sending email spam, downloading child porn, etc, etc also violates their ToS. However just as long they as treat those packets the same as any other packet they are network neutral.
My ISP didn't enforce the no-servers rule so I was able to run home servers but you shouldn't have rules that violate net neutrality that you "choose" when to enforce. People need to be able to tinker and figure things out without artificial restrictions that exist purely so that they can claim to not have bandwidth caps. It's borderline false advertisement and a violation of net neutrality.
https://fiber.google.com/help/ : Can I run a server from my home?
Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
video-conferencing, home security and others which may
include server capabilities but are being used for legal
and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged.It's simple and obvious and I'm amazed that Google, of all companies, isn't smart enough to figure this solution out on their own.
From the ISP's point of view, their infrastructure costs are based on the bandwidth used, not the specific application. The only reason they care about the latter is to price-discriminate between businesses and consumers.
[1] The numbers and units are obviously parameters that a specific ISP needs to tweak based on their actual costs.
[2] Or more sophisticated variations on this theme, like using an hourly basis: e.g. if your usage during the last 720 hours (30 days) exceeds 100 GB, then throttle for a few hours until some high-usage hours fall off the end of the 720-hour window. Or better yet, weight previous usage exponentially.
I guess I don't understand all the complaints along this vein. It's not like providers come back and try to sue you for excess bandwidth usage. They just say 'no thanks we don't want you as a customer'. If you walked into a mcdonalds and ordered 1 small fry and asked for 1000 ketchup packets they would probably do the same. Despite condiments being unlimited.
[citation needed]
This is like the all-you-can-eat buffet that changes the rules when a football team shows up.
We want ISPs to stop advertising non-unlimited service as "unlimited". But the tech community seems to only accept the solution wherein unlimited service is provided, ignoring the other (IMO much better) solution wherein non-unlimited service is advertised as non-unlimited, and the non-unlimitedness is provided in a sane manner with usage-based billing rather than vague rules.
It's like the all-you-can-eat buffet that changes the rules when a football team shows up, but also everybody gets upset any time the buffet thinks about changing to an a la carte model.
Add to that programs and OS's that automatically update, family members / unsecured wifi that results in uploads/downloads without the subscriber's knowledge, and the fact that (especially at fiber speeds) most downloads are in the "fast" to "instantaneous" range. (In the 56k days, you knew to be cautious about downloading big files, because tying up the phone line for a couple hours could be a major inconvenience.)
So I guess people are more willing to pay for a product that's a fixed cost instead of variable cost -- even if variable cost would be lower -- because the conceptual workload of understanding what a gigabyte is, and monitoring their usage in gigabytes, represents a cost higher than the price differential between fixed and variable.
I'm sure we'd all save on car repair if everyone in the country knew the basics of it, but it's really just not in everyones interest to know a little bit of everything.
> Home users don't really want unmetered connections
Implying that the commenter was in favor of giving home users metered connections (with a gigabyte cap).
I was saying that the problem with a plan to give customers capped connections is that many of them don't understand the concept of a monthly transfer cap and don't know how to effectively monitor or control their usage to stay within the cap.
I didn't mean to say that the problem with the customers is that they don't understand the concept of a monthly transfer cap.
But I might've come across that way, because trying to get non-technical people to understand technical topics is usually an exercise in frustration and futility (as most HN readers probably already know). And I guess some of that mindset colored the tone of my comment.
And it would be interesting to try to fix it as if the customers were the problem -- i.e., an ISP that tries to educate its users about what a gigabyte is and provide bandwidth monitoring tools. Maybe it'll improve technological literacy if people realize that knowledge can save them money. But I fear it'd be an uphill battle.
What a shock that Google is now flip-flopping on network neutrality.
If you want to host services, get static IP blocks, run BGP, pay more for a business-grade service.
I've yet to come across a decent provider package that lets me host a server with at least 99% uptime. FiOS seems to go down like clockwork in the mid mornings for the past 2 months or so and that kept me from even attempting to run a server from home. I mean, what's the point?
Besides that pretty much every provider has their variation on server bans. I think Optimum just says "servers" are prohibited whereas Verizon goes into a bit more detail "Web, FTP, SMTP" etc...
This really has nothing to do with "network management," the go to catch-all that every ISP --including Google now, it seems-- trots out every time network neutrality comes up. This has everything to do with ensuring that old-school business models are propped up that expect captive, consuming audiences, rather than adhering to the decentralized model of independent nodes on the network.
I would also like to point out that, back in 2008, TWC refused to sell me business-class service because I wasn't a business. Even if I formed one, the only business-class service they would run to our house was their basic "Teleworker" service.
[1] This may not be completely true, as AT&T claims they can provide it. I don't know how they can when others cannot, but their website may only be claiming that based on straight-line distance from the CO rather than loop length.
Another Negropontean idea was that bits are bits. The notion of somehow partitioning server-like entities on the basis of their behavior doesn't fit, he argued, the architecture of the Internet.
I must be getting old, because I want to scream 'I remember when internet access was charged by the minute! and only at 14.4kbps!'
At the end of the day google fiber is business.
C'mon, if you're saturating a 1gb connection for a large percentage of the day, you're doing something other than what most would consider "personal use". I think they need to define "personal use", i.e., "typical household use, browsing the internet, watching the occasional streaming video", certainly not "downloading huge torrents at all times and monitoring the cameras at your small business."
I would kill for access to G Fiber.
This only exists because of bad users, don't blame the ISPs for your lousy neighbors :)
And you all are COMPLAINING about that in a "you're not the boss of me" kind of way, ranting about how QoS limitations violates "net neutrality", etc etc. Seriously?
This is not an argument, and neither is "Oh, please!" (for future reference.)