A Slashdot comment on Google Fiber "no servers" clause (2012) | Hacker News Reader

A Slashdot comment on Google Fiber "no servers" clause (2012)

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120 pointsyuhong42 comments

Google Fiber changed its terms of service in October. The terms now only forbid running a server "for commercial purposes". [0]

I have Google Fiber, and I'm fine with the new terms. I do wonder, though, what would happen if I set up a Tor exit node or something. ...

0. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/google...

The pain with running an exit node is the shit storm you can bring down on yourself if someone grabs child porn via your node.You can end up with all of your equipment siezed for quite some time until they figure out it was from tor.

I believe there was a "How To Run a Tor Exit Node" article posted to HN a while back which basically said "never run it from your house" (always run it from a dedicated hosting provider), for that reason.

Be warned though. At least in Germany they come to your home long after they seized the server. They might even come to your home after they know the seized server was a Tor node.

Would it be allowed to connect a none profit data center then ?

It makes their monopoly only stronger. So to say, for any innovator who wants to use his OWN Internet connection to host whatever s/he deems good, it is prohibited by Google. Ok, that's unfair!

You sure don't OWN it. You can lease IP addresses from the registry, but you still don't own them, you can get an Internet connection from a company, but you don't own it, you are leasing the line and bandwidth from the provider.

Why is it illegal, that's the question! It does not harm anyone!

Ok, but one doesn't need to fully own the cable, to run a startup's server on it. They can forbid SMTP servers, ok, but HTTP etc. should be allowed.

You mean I need my own hacker satellite to own it? Even then, how would you connect your satellite to the network?

This is mostly an issue of the limitations of law, or to put it more precisely, having to deal with the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law.

If the intention is only to prevent large-scale data center, forbidding all commercial form of servers is clearly overkill by a large margin. However, if they limit the scope, they might miss use cases which are by everyone's definition abusive, but not technically a "large-scale data center".

I find the same problem in license texts. The GPL should really only have to be a single line saying "Do what ever you want with the program, so long you do not restrict anyone else in doing the same". Following the spirit, it would cover any form of restrictions now and in the future, regardless if people tried to use hardware restrictions, legal restriction, or obfuscation (like machine language) to restrict users of the program. Applying a different license with a lower requirement, would simply be a matter of intentionally trying to circumvent the wishes of the author.

Alas, licenses are not written like if they were enforced by the spirit of the text, but rather as if they were enforced by the letter of the text. As such, they try to include all forms of license circumventing into a now rather long license text, and when new license-circumventing techniques gets invented, the license text gets an update.

Wouldn't it be nice if licenses and terms of services would just write down what they want, rather than trying to cover every aspect imaginable just in case?

Much like computers, the modern legal system doesn't work particularly well if you expect it to "do what I mean, not what I said".

The difference is that compiler errors on the computer don't usually cost six figures when they happen. ;)

Is there a context to this being posted? (Honest question.)

Being on a website called Hacker News.

Seriously, this surprises you?

yes, it is not news if the link is a year old and deals with a topic that is no longer relevant.

This is noise, unless there is some related context.

He's got a point though, theres quite a bit of precedence for this. E.g. all the random wiki articles posted that aren't 'news'.

To be fair though, most of the random wiki articles aren't about corporate gossip.

HN's front page sometimes has a flow to it for some stories. If a big comment thread starts about the wisdom of rewriting software, often someone will submit Joel's "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" [1]. More recently, if someone proposes a cracking contest, you'll get "The Fallacy of Cracking Contests" [2]. etc.

So my question is, this sounds like it's part of some thread or other; what is it?

"What is the context of this post?" is a completely different question than the more-often-asked one "What is this doing here, by which I passively-aggressively mean this shouldn't be here?", but I understand the confusion (no sarcasm, I really do). thisiswrong's reply is what I was looking for.

[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932648 ; see tptacek's top-level post

Yes. Larry, and Google have gotten a lot of (well-merited) bad PR recently.

Sadly PR-stunts like these were, so far , only restricted to Reddit [1]. But it seems that HN has a growing user-base and can no longer escape the commercial shills and PR submissions like these.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/shill [1] http://factions.in/article/General/How_I_Turned_My_Back_On_R...

I found this by a link from another Slashdot comment and thought it was interesting.

Yes, and Obama wishes he could close Guantanamo Bay. Oh, wait. He could, if he actually wanted to.

Your move, Larry.

He could in the same way that the laws of physics don't prevent me from, I dunno, jumping off of a bridge or stealing a kidney from a homeless person.

A silly comment.

The parent wasn't much better...

To be fair, Larry didn't post that comment. It's written by an anonymous person who claims to have heard Larry say that.

For reference, here is Obama's executive order to close Guantanamo (date: the 2 days after inauguration).

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/closure-guantanam...

Just because he could convince congress to stop blocking him doesn't mean the concessions he would have to make would be reasonable. They probably wouldn't be as bad as Clinton/CHIP (Republican congress holding health care for children hostage to secure a 33% cut in capital gains tax during an economic boom), but if said history is any indication the concessions he would have to make to fulfill his mandate might cost thousands of American lives.

All congress could do is hold back funds; several groups have volunteered to cover all costs and been ignored.

These are the terms from Optimum Online:

    Users may not run any type of server on the system. This
    includes but is not limited to FTP, IRC, SMTP, POP, HTTP, 
    SOCKS, SQUID, DNS or any multi-user forums;

    Users may not register or point a domain, sub-domain,
    or hostname to any Optimum Online IP address. Moreover,
    Users may not have traffic redirected to the Optimum
    Online Service;

I can't remember what the terms were last time I was on Comacast, but I believe they explicitly allowed running a server under some conditions (non-commercial perhaps?). There are plenty of ways they could cover their asses while still allowing people to run servers. One of the best things about web services that have been popping up over the last couple years is that they offer so much more in terms of monitoring. If Google just says to keep continuous services within some range, with a distinction between peak and non-peak hours (or even better, close-to-live network stats), what is the problem? Well adjusted bots could swamp the network if every client is using it up I suppose...

Edit: Just saw the ToS update posted below. It's an improvement, but I'm honestly surprised that a company like Google can't just skip the vague give-them-what-they-want-without-screwing-ourselves language and clearly lay down the rules in a way that's irrelevant to the common user but explicit for more aware users.

"running servers" reminds me a lot on restrictions on some systems against "running arbitrary code", then letting you browse the web with javascript turned on. These days servers take all kinds of form, from an FTP server to somebody hosting a deathmatch from their xbox. Hell would my browser going to a page that uses web sockets count as a server? Is an X server a server? I'm sure I'm running half a dozen chrome extension that count as servers in some way.

Here's a web server in a browser! http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/puramu/a-browser-based-webserver...

It's dumb and pointless, what they should be saying is what they mean, if they're afraid of too much bandwidth utilization then say "users may not saturate their connections above 30% bandwidth utilization for longer than 3 hours" or some such. If it's not wanting people to run commercial services then a couple clauses of either "for noncommercial use only" or "not to be held liable for commercial servers running on residential lines" or whatever is the appropriate legalese.

It's just weird old thinking that has nothing to do with how the technology actually works.

> It's just weird old thinking that has nothing to do with how the technology actually works.

It has nothing to do with the technology at all. A cable modem has perfectly adequate performance for a lot of commercial uses and the telecommunications companies want those customers to have to pay 50X as much for a leased line.

Which is why it doesn't make any sense for Google to be doing it. Their purpose isn't to upsell business customers, it's to demonstrate demand for high bandwidth connections so they can pressure other telecommunications companies to increase capacity.

The whole "heavy users" thing is bunkum. Yes, 20% of the users transfer 80% of the data. That's how pretty much everything works. People are diverse and have non-uniform usage patterns, and if you sort by consumption level then the high end tautologically uses more per capita than the low end. But bandwidth is by far not the predominant cost of providing internet service. The predominant cost is getting the wire to the endpoint whatsoever, once it's there you can send as many bits as you can fit and upgrades are a matter of replacing terminating equipment rather than going back into manholes and bucket trucks. If bandwidth consumption were to quintuple it wouldn't require any significant rate increase -- it has been increasing exponentially for years with no real trouble.

The only reason telcos talk about heavy users is that they want to engage in price discrimination and they know it confuses people who are used to dealing with commodities whose dominant cost is the unit cost rather than ones whose dominant cost is the fixed cost of building a distribution system.

> The only reason telcos talk about heavy users is that they want to engage in price discrimination and they know it confuses people who are used to dealing with commodities whose dominant cost is the unit cost rather than ones whose dominant cost is the fixed cost of building a distribution system.

I'd say it's reasonable to charge heavy users more. Firstly, the cost is not totally fixed for the ISP, higher usage involves investment in their own infrastructure (routers, transit etc.). Secondly, it's arguable that heavy users derive greater utility from the service so won't object to higher prices.

> Firstly, the cost is not totally fixed for the ISP, higher usage involves investment in their own infrastructure (routers, transit etc.).

You want to find out how small a portion of the total cost that actually is? Require the ILECs to lease the physical wire from the customer premises to the central office and space in the central office for the lessee's terminating equipment, prohibit the last mile provider from sharing ownership with a backhaul provider and then have the likes of Level 3 and Verizon compete with each other to sell connectivity from your local central office to the wider internet.

> Secondly, it's arguable that heavy users derive greater utility from the service so won't object to higher prices.

Also known as price discrimination.

The first obvious question is how good is the Fiber pool? Almost any ISP I have encountered in NYC oversold their pools. Time Warner though has improved pretty well for about a year (but still crappy from time to time).

The second question is how does Fiber do in the future when it opens up in other towns and cities? Say it comes to NYC, and Google just not able to handle that crazy botnet running in some residential pool, should they pull the plug and say NO MORE SERVER?

I like running server straight from my connection if it is stable and fast. I am just afraid that they might say no in the future when things get worse.

They did not remove the clause completely, they changed the clause.

The problem is, even if they only have that in their TOS to cover their asses, there are people that won't run servers because of that clause, regardless of whether or not they would get punished for doing it.

It reminds me of the anti reverse engineering clause in MS EULAs.

That sort of clause is pretty common in software these days. Even Google has them e.g. the Google Earth EULA.

Like people who can read and don't want to put themselves in a position where all of their employees' financial security depends on Google ignoring the fact that their terms of service were violated?

I'm sorry, hasn't this been the "No Duh that's why the clause is there?" line of thinking for everyone? I'm actually a little surprised by the comment the submission links to because it makes it out that Larry didn't get that idea from the get go. Of course you need to protect yourself from that one jerk that goes too far and tries to start an ISP out of his personal Google Fiber connection or something like that.

I'm sure Larry got that idea. I suspect he refused to accept that doing what everyone else did was the only solution.

(2012) The ToS has since been updated slightly, although I don't know if Page is happy with the current version. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/google...

Almost certainly they were violating Stanford's terms of use when they set up Google in their dorm room or whatever. The university where I work has all kinds of prohibitions on what students can do, e.g. no personal routers or wifi, no hosting servers, certainly nothing commercial, etc.

Pretty sure if I am hosting a website (even a popular one), Google isn't going to come bringing the law.

If they did get annoyed with the violation of terms, they would probably first send me a warning, at which point I was just transfer the hosting to AWS or something.

Google is Evil.

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