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.

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.

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?

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)

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.

- 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.

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.

- 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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is the problem.

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).

  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.

  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.

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.

What? They absolutely can do that.

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 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 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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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?

So, Googler, Tell me why you are convinced that Gmail is highly secure and my email is not being snarfed by the NSA?

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.

"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."

https://fiber.google.com/help/

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)

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.

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!).

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.

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.

That said, I think it's reasonable to limit it to personal use - especially if that extends to your 2nd degree friends.

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.

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.

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.

I personally use servers.

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...

"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.