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Comment by eksith | Hacker News Reader

Oh dear. Looks like the work left for Google Fiber isn't done yet. Hoping they'll make a run in New York (or at least upstate where I intend to move), but that's a long shot.

I wonder how much independent ISPs could make if they stick to a small list of customers, but take up the "We Don't Throttle" stance.

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Google Fiber is the worst idea ever. You know this company makes the vast majority of its income through advertising and collecting data about you, right?

I understand that it's a great service for a great price, but the question is how long that remains sustainable. Right now they're sitting on such a pile of money that it doesn't matter whether they provide internet access in a few cities at a super cheap price. They benefit enough in reputation and in extra usage of other services when people are able to use very high quality internet.

Proof of this is that Google disallowed running servers (the very thing that makes the internet the internet, end to end communication) up until their reputation was almost completely tarnished in the hacker community. Only then did they relent and allow servers to be run. They're not much different from other for-profit companies.

Google disallowed servers initially as a non-insignificant number of people thought of the service as an easy entry into mass virtual hosting as soon as they got it. That started to affect throughput[1]. As mentioned numerous times elsewhere, their ultimate goal is to embarrass ISPs into providing better service. That seems to be working in Texas ATM. The hobbyists that complained got an exemption in their TOS for non-commercial use[2].

Of course, Google is collecting information about me. As is every other ISP (Verizon and Comcast hijack domain misspellings to redirect to their search pages), which is why VPNs and Tor are so popular right now.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/google...

[2] https://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2659981

> (Verizon and Comcast hijack domain misspellings to redirect to their search pages)

What?! Thought only OpenDNS (and similar services) did that bullshit, and in their case I can understand. In the case of an ISP... you're paying them already!

They totally did. I used to be on Comcast and they did it all the time. There's a setting to turn it off, apparently, but I was never able to. I switched to FiOS fairly recently and it was the same. Any time I browse to an invalid URL, it went to the Verizon search capture page that I had to manually opt out.

E.G. http://youtube.ff goes to http://search.dnsassist.verizon.net/assist.php?url=youtube.f...

They explain it in the DNS about page : http://search.dnsassist.verizon.net/skins/verizon/en/about.h...

You have to go into the router to turn it off. http://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/fiosinte...

They would be stupid to allow servers. Buy your own business line if you want that. Google doesn't want others losing bandwidth because some people want to run servers.

There is a reason the internet was designed with end to end connectivity in mind. If my ISP randomly start filtering packets, like AWS traffic or incoming TCP SYN packets, net neutrality is broken and I will break the contract with that ISP right away. Contract or not, they won't get another penny.

It's a different matter if I consume 5TB of data per month and it's costing them a lot of money on bandwidth to upstream providers. But filtering servers altogether is plain old evil. It doesn't cost them anything and they don't have to decide what's right for me.

I don't think Google looks for traffic originating from a server specifically. I doubt it is really even possible as it would look just like traffic from a normal computer.

The prohibition on servers has very little to do with network bandwidth. It has a lot to do with people bandwidth - overhead associated with support, security and compliance.

>Google Fiber is the worst idea ever. You know this company makes the vast majority of its income through advertising and collecting data about you, right?

You never actually made a point here, do you have one? Obviously google makes money through advertising so getting you fast internet allows you to see more ads, is that a bad trade off?

Well my response to Google Fiber is somewhat triggered by a book called Ready Player One, in which a big company (with some similarities to Google) controls lots of things online, including many consumer's connections to the internet. They then of course abuse this, and it would be incredibly easy for Google to do the same and invade our privacy further.

So my point is, if it wasn't clear already, privacy invasion. As I mentioned, they are like any other for-profit company and not interested in doing what's best for consumers. Their goal of making other ISPs provide better service sounds so noble, but I doubt it.

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