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Google Argues Against Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an article at Wired:
"In a dramatic about-face on a key internet issue yesterday, Google told the FCC (PDF) that the network neutrality rules Google once championed don't give citizens the right to run servers on their home broadband connections, and that the Google Fiber network is perfectly within its rights to prohibit customers from attaching the legal devices of their choice to its network."
Google plans to offer its own business-class services on Fiber. Can't have people running their own servers as competition. This company tends to claim support for whatever is politically popular among techies and then quietly go back on it when it affects their bottom line.
here is what they were responding to-
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/mcclendon_notice_of_informal_complaint.pdf
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf
No they didn't. Nearly every consumer ISP has clauses that state you can't run "business servers" through the residential connections. While that term is broad and hard to enforce, ISP's don't hassle you if your traffic is light or unobtrusive. I've only been notified by Charter about my server when it got a PHP/SQL injection and hosted a virus. As soon as that was cleared up and patched they didn't care about it.
In all fairness, Google was in favor of net neutrality before they became evil. Things are different on the dark side.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If I wish to water some hedges trimmed into offensive shapes or power up a TV containing offensive images, it is NOT within the rights of the respective utility companies to tell me what to do. They can only charge me per unit of consumed resources. It's none of their business what I do with it. If you promise me X amount of mbp/s, then you damn well better deliver on it and 'do no evil' as you claim to.
The issue here isn't exactly net neutrality, it's that Google has to have some way of stopping users from sucking up all the bandwidth.
If the ISPs quit insisting on these fake "unlimited" bandwidth plans, there wouldn't be a need to have weird rules to stop people from running high-bandwidth servers.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
what in the name of all things good does it mean to "leech bandwidth". What makes _your_ "use" of bandwidth ok, and _mine_ "leaching"???
According to the Google reply, the complainer doesn't even have Google Fiber service, or live in an area where Google provides fiber services. Go complain to your own ISP, buddy. FYI, his ISP is Time Warner Cable
Complainant here. I was living in Kansas City when the complaint was made, and for months after. I have since moved a few miles east. I think you'll see that I am not the only residential internet user who would like to be able to run a server without violating their contract.
"Nobody advocates a strict, absolute interpenetration of "Net Neutrality", or you could get away with ping flooding your neighbor under the guise of free and unfettered access."
Do you really think Google couldn't have 1-3 employees spend 1-3 hours crafting language that would make it clear the difference between such obvious abuse, and "prohibiting any kind of server"?
For frack's sake, this is about Google not wanting home servers to provide the masses with alternatives to things like Gmail and GoogleHangouts. This is 2013 for frack's sake, and I can't run an OpenArena server without violating my contract? Really?!?
For me, the key thrust of net nuetrality is more about the network provider not being able to block or degrade the level of service based on the content being transfered and upon the providers preferences. For me, net neutrality doesn't really come into it with regards to the the amount of traffic I'm moving through the pipe I paid for -- that seems to be the domain of the license attached to the package plan I signed up for.
In my mind, it would be evil for Google to tell me I can't serve up or consume certain kind of (legal) content or to degrade my service while I am, but its not evil for them to not want me serving up 75TB/mo on my residential-class fiber connection that costs me 39.99/mo. Granted, if they sell me a package that's billed as "unlimited" then that's on them and they can stick it, but if they offer a limited, cheaper service for the masses, and a more-expensive, less-restrictive plan for those that want to pay for it, then its reasonable for them to want to get paid for it.
Offer unlimited downstream bandwidth, and a reasonable, loosely-enforced upstream cap that won't raise a flag for normal usage. When a user consistently goes over, call them up and find out what's what, then just raise their cap because they actually are just doing a lot of something reasonable, or bump their cap for a fee if they're doing something that needs to be done under a different plan. Problem solved.
If I understand correctly, there is verbiage in the contract about a prior written permission. Why did the ISP (Google, that is) refuse your request? Or is it a fake altogether and there is no way to make such request?
If you read my manifesto, you'll see that my answer to this involves pointing out the verbiage in the NetNeutrality document (FCC 10-201 Report and Order Preserving the Open Internet) which states that the internet is awesome, *precisely* because Tim-Berners Lee was able to develop and deploy WWW/http "without getting any permission from governments or network providers" (close to verbatim).
That bullshit's been going on back as far as 1996 from my experience - & still goes on, unfettered. The only unlimited thing I see is unlimited bullshit!
trusted them all this time, all I can say is 'not surprised'.
While I have an android device, it hasn't got google play/appstore, login, nor data service to it. Won't save me from the NSA's taps/recording, but it does a pretty good job of keeping out commercial tracking.
How much longer do we have for that to stay true however? Android 4.3's restrictions, google's no-server limitations, etc are all pushing the masses towards sheepitude, and (ignoring the other players for the moment) government is pinching in with legal limits and surveillance from the other side.
Corporate Pot, meet Government Kettle. People: Meet hard place in between.
It seems Google has its hands in everything: Search, social, advertising, online media, emails, cloud hosting, and now connectivity. At which point should we begin to worry?
A residential service is meant for residential purposes. Your TOS explicitly states this. If you wish to use your internet service for commercial purposes then you pay for commercial service. Implicit with your residential service is a certain expectation of consumption. To use a car analogy, you are buying a tank of gas. Your subscription dictates how much fuel you get. If you're paying for the consumption of a passenger car, why should you expect to get the fuel for a public bus? This isn't a network neutrality issue. This is attempting to freeload and crying when you aren't given what you didn't pay for.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
In my mind, it would be evil for Google to tell me I can't serve up or consume certain kind of (legal) content or to degrade my service while I am
Umm which is exactly what they are doing; literally telling their customers that they may not serve content. (And it is evil for any ISP to have a policy against "servers" of any kind. If Google doesn't want customers running servers, their only ethical alternative is to make it clear that they are selling Googlenet and absolutely, emphatically NOT Internet access.)
How does using what you contracted to get amount to "abusive behaviour"? There are other ways to prevent ping flooding. Perhaps the same way we limit things like free speech by; saying it's only free so long as you don't harm others.
If they advertise "10mbits unlimited" then they have to deliver "10 mbits unlimited". If they want to prevent overuse, then why don't they just say "10mbits, 1tb quota" or something similar. That's how it is here in Australia. I have a 200gb plan and anything I use above that is shaped to 256k. My use fits well within that and if I need more I can up to a 500gb or 1tb plan. No uncertain "acceptable use" clauses. I can transfer 200gb, and as long as I'm not doing anything illegal like attempting to hack into a government database or peddling child porn, I don't need to worry about getting reprimanding calls from my ISP or LEO.
The net neutrality debate is NOT about preventing abuse, as many naive people would like to believe. It is about ensuring that home users don't develop services that compete with commercial ones.
For example, Google doesn't want anyone starting up community-run OwnCloud instances reducing the attractiveness of Google's services now do they? How hard would it be to run a server to sync your contacts, files, calendar and other PIM data either yourself or with a group of friends? We're pretty much there with open source software like OwnCloud and Zimbra. THIS is what Google and other service providers don't want. They are protecting their ability to monetise you and charge you for the basic services that could be done privately, securely and effectively yourself.
I hate printers.
If you have voting shareholders, you are evil. If you do not, you are probably evil.
I think you would find a very negative reaction if you set up a Water bottling business at your house and started selling the water you get from utility company. Setting up hosting is similar in that you are using resources not intended to be used and are "selling" something that is not yours.
Setting up a Charging station and charging people to charge up their cars using electricity at your residential rates would get you the same response.
The Unlimited Data is a false promise, but I don't see how it has anything to do with Net Neutrality.
I don't know because I have not looked, but I'm sure that Google has a "Business Plan" for those that want to host just like Cox has a business hosting package.
"Servers" are technically difficult to accurately define within the context of a residential broadband connection, but you know what they are when you see them.
The only solution that would satisfy the hordes of /.ers, apparently, involves treating every customer as a business customer. After which I fully expect /. to explode with wild conspiracy theories around the rising cost of broadband.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I like how this contentless ad-hominem is modded up to 2. Keep up the good work, mods!
Back in my day, leeching meant finding a way to impersonate someone else on a dial-in server and using bandwidth against their quota. That made sense - you were using what someone else was entitled to. Later it came to mean downloading from peer-to-peer networks without sharing. Still made sense - you took from the community without contributing. But just using your own bandwidth for something someone doesn't smile on? Where's the leeching in that? Now get off my lawn!
The whole original IDEA was peer to peer networking that could route around damage. Somehow, we've let it become "everything gets routed through a few big players, and they can tell you what packets you can send and receive".
Sad thing is, this direction has been BLINDINGLY obvious for over a decade, easy. But nobody cared. It's only going to get worse and worse, until the internet is TV 2.0, just like the media companies wanted. And we - the internet using public - sat idly by and let them do it.
Actually no, you are completely and totally wrong!
In your very messed up world view, all they have to do is put in 'we have the right to limit service to remote end points as we see fit'
and they can do what they want.
The point of network neutrality is that they are not ALLOWED to limit what services are carried based on source/destination, only on
amount of bandwidth consumed.
It would be like a petrol station selling you gas that could (somehow) only be used to drive on local roads, not on the freeway...
THAT is network neutrality!
When its the other guy that gets the shaft.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For me, the key thrust of net nuetrality is more about the network provider not being able to block or degrade the level of service based on the content being transfered and upon the providers preferences.
Which is exactly what is being done here.
um.. leeching bandwidth? they paid for it! If I pay for X amount of bytes per month at a given speed, I should be able to use that any way I choose, up or down.. It's the responsibility of the isp to set their prices so that they don't lose their shirts, not the responsibility of the users to read their minds and use their bandwidth 'altruistically.' Artificial use-type caps are just a shitty way of bilking people.
Even electrical providers don't do this.. They just bill on the kWhr (and by power factor with commercial/industrial service). How you use that power is up to you.
Leeching is apparently now having the TV on all the time maximizing the bandwidth on the cable. How dare they use what they paid for to the fullest extend?
If you want high speed net access, and don't want to pay a lot, you have to play nice with others and share. You can be offered 100mbit or gig to your home, with backhaul to more or less support it, for not too much money. However you can't be offered dedicated bandwidth in that amount unless you want to pay a bunch more. Just how it works. When you start talking dedicated bandwidth, the backhaul goes up massively in requirements and thus cost.
Well that means users have to keep their usage reasonable and that means no servers that gobble up bandwidth. If everyone plays nice and uses their net as home users normally do, links can be heavily oversubscribed and thus the price can be low. However if users start hammering things, it'll either mean poor service for everyone else or a need for a large increase in cost.
You can't get everything for nothing. Fast shared networks work only when people share.
...But just using your own bandwidth for something someone doesn't smile on? Where's the leeching in that? Now get off my lawn!
The problem is that you're not just using your bandwidth. These are residential lines, not dedicated, and as such are shared between other nearby users. It's not the type of traffic that they care about, it's the quantity. These no server clauses are there so they have a framework to cancel users who are running a datacenter out of their house, using terabytes of traffic per month. People who do so "leech" the available bandwidth from everyone in the area.
Yes, it's unfortunately vague, but it is not about net neutrality. (Or at least it's not until there's an incident of abuse shutting down a small server they don't like. That would be newsworthy.)
I really don't understand why ISPs don't offer high bandwidth, without quotas and caps.
What they can do is prioritize packets based on monthly usage. And that is only the simplest solution. (They could even offer QOS to the technologically inclined.) Want fast Internet during peak hours? Don't use too much bandwidth during peak hours! The concept is simple, but executives can't see beyond charging tiered usage.
(And none of this precludes selling bandwidth minimum guarantees to businesses hosting their own servers. Think outside the box, people.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Net neutrality means that content is freely available to all. It does not mean that an ISP has to provide the same services to all of it's users. At best it means that everyone has the opportunity to purchase or lease said services without bias or prejudice.
I don't see Google as having shifted their stance at all. They're merely talking from a different viewpoint on the issue, and just so happen to agree with pretty much every other ISP on the planet: if you want to run servers, you pay for business class services.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This would all be solved if they just charged for the total data sent and received. They could charge something like a $20 monthly rate and $0.01 for each GB transferred.
This would mean that someone that transferred a terabyte would have to pay $30 for the month. Still pretty reasonable. Someone who transferred 10 terabytes would have to pay $120.
These are just numbers I came up with now. I'm sure they could be tweaked to make sure Google still makes a profit on people running servers and doesn't overcharge regular customers.
Consumers demand it. People love "unlimited". Even when they don't need it, even if you can give them proof positive a metered plan will save money, they don't want that. Consumers want a flat rate to pay, period.
Please, don't feed the trolls!
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Google... it's all about the loss of revenues... geez.
you are confused.
first of all, we paid the telcoms *billions* of dollars in the 1990s to provide us with high speed networking. guess what they did with that money instead?
now we get 1/20 or less the bandwidth of the rest of the world.
the bandwidth leeches are the telecoms.
if I am paying for x mBytes down and y kbytes up, there is no ambiguity about what that means I am paying for (and note again, fhese rates are *pitifully slow*)
so no, we're not to cry you a river about what the lines can carry. those LEECHES, who have stolen billions from we the taxpayer and we the subscribers, can upgrade their gear so they can provide what they claim to have sold us.
quit being a shill for the LEECHES
The solution to this is to simply not oversell your backhaul: don't sell speeds and quotas you can't deliver. I know quotas and bandwidth control are not popular here, but no matter how fat you make your pipes, people will clog them, and if you want the best overall experience for everyone, you need to do something about it.
Have a certain maximum burst up/down rate, throttle it to a maximum sustained rate under continuous load, after say five minutes saturated, and ramp it back up when the usage backs off. Also implement a monthly up/down transfer quota.
Let people use their quota as they like, and importantly be transparent about it: give them tools to monitor their usage, current restrictions, etc. This will let them see if the service is adequate for their needs and plan for upgrades if necessary.
The internet, which once gave us a chance to raise ourselves to a level playing field, or at least a chance to start somewhere without a thousand gallons of bureaucratic bullshit, is now being used against us to, once again, enforce the class separation into lowly consumers and privileged creators.
My ISP has never balked at me for running my personal website from my web server at home. If ever they start blocking inbound port 80, you can bet I'll be raising hell and making credible legal threats.
The service providers own their service. They sell what they want to sell. You are not entitled to get your way in all things. Just because someone offers services that differ from what you want doesn't mean it is okay to force them through governmental action to offer what you want. If you want a gallon of milk and Costco only sells in 2 gallon increments, do you ask congress for a bill commanding them to sell single gallons? Of course not; that would be wrong. You would buy somewhere else. The same is true of internet service. You don't like what they offer, buy somewhere else. If enough people agree with you, they will get the message, or maybe your preferences aren't the same as everyone else's. Either is fine.
I've only heard one good argument about why net neutrality should be enforced by law, and that's that there are too few options in internet service, effectively making them monopolies. That argument actually makes sense. But if that's your position, then you don't want the FCC involved, you want the FTC. Having the FTC do it is fine. It follows the common precedent that it is justified to compel fairness in the behavior of a company when there is not a real open market for its services. If the FCC does it then the precedent is very broad, that it's okay to compel a company to offer a particular set of services merely because the services deal with communications.
None of this is to say that net neutrality itself is a bad thing. I want it. I would prefer if my ISP offered it, and I would pay a modest amount for it. I also think it's a good (in the being a good citizen sense) position for the providers to take. But the government is the biggest, meanest bully on the block. If they're going to be asked to wield that considerable power to force someone to do something, you want to be damn sure it's justified, and it has to be done for the right reasons.
Well.. I used to be jealous of the google fiber cities...
Now I'm happy to live on with my 40mbps/20mbps connection with 16 static IPs and an ISP that happily lets me host servers in my basement...
(minecraft, git repos, a couple web servers, media server, encrypted voip server for friends and family.... ) All cranking away on a couple old dell servers from ebay...
seriously I wouldn't go near google fiber with that policy if they paid me to use it, in fact they couldn't pay me enough to use it (well... maybe if they paid me 6-700/mo so I could afford to colo my 2 servers in a cheapo datacenter)
If I can't code a server and run it out of my house?
God spoke to me
ummm ... let me get this straight ... say I'm running my own private cloud or social media instance so that google or whoever can't access or analytic my content without sending me one of those nice National Security Letters or specifically hacking my instance ... so if google et al have their way I, as a private citizen, not as a corprat or pornmeister, have absolutely no option but to have my content/intellectual property/commercial in confidences as an open book ?
I didn't see that anywhere in the linked article, but *LOTS* of ISPs will let you run a server, even comcast will sell you a static IP (for $30/mo) and let you run a server. Sure if you're filling up your upstream pipe 24/7/365 they'll probably get upset with you, but I've been running servers in my house since 2000 when I first got dsl, business servers, hosting websites (mine and other people's), hosting email, blogs, voip, code repositories, minecraft, you name it... I've been on 4 different ISPs over the 13 years, and have never had a problem (even when the ISP was qwest... well there was a reliability problem then, but not a "shut down your service" problem).
"I was a devout fan of Ayn Rand and a card carrying libertarian for many years of my young adulthood."
Ahh.. the folly of youth, how I loathe thee.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Nobody could have predicted this.
Googles got their sweet deal, the NSA stamp of approval, and fuck you anyway.
Please, find an alternative. I've chosen startpage and it's served me well. It's supposed to be pretty anonymous and doesn't track.
I heard of some way to corrupt cookies or something so that bad, random data is sent to trackers. Does anyone know anything about this? Not for the NSA, that's a whole different fight, but I'm talking about outfits like google and others that try to monetize your browsing history. If you're aware of this technology, please let me know.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Internode attempted this in Australia with the "flatrate" plans, but they ended 2005, because enough low end users weren't attracted to the plans to balance out the top 10% of downloaders. It is well worth reading the detailed post by Simon Hackett (of Internet Toaster fame) explaining the reasons. You might be surprised that the CEO would write in such detail and openly the business.
The reality is that while it doesn't cost any more to provide 10Mbps or 1Gbps over the first piece of fibre from your home it does cost significantly more to route that data to it's end destination. People need to be prepared to pay for that, just like we pay for the amount of water and electricity consumed. Would people be complaining if the tap was left running all day?
The solution to this is to simply not oversell your backhaul: don't sell speeds and quotas you can't deliver. I know quotas and bandwidth control are not popular here, but no matter how fat you make your pipes, people will clog them, and if you want the best overall experience for everyone, you need to do something about it.
Have a certain maximum burst up/down rate, throttle it to a maximum sustained rate under continuous load, after say five minutes saturated, and ramp it back up when the usage backs off. Also implement a monthly up/down transfer quota.
Let people use their quota as they like, and importantly be transparent about it: give them tools to monitor their usage, current restrictions, etc. This will let them see if the service is adequate for their needs and plan for upgrades if necessary.
I would love for that to happen, honestly. If it were me I'd have tiered priorities, habitually heavy users would have a lower percentage access to bandwidth during peak use.
Unfortunately, that's not likely. It's an advertising thing; the average consumer doesn't know or care about network limitations, they just hear "but it's not unlimited", see that your competitors offer "unlimited", and jump ship. :-/
I don't know where in the US you live, but where I live (yes in the lower 48) I've been hosting servers happily on residential connections for 13 years, using 4 different ISPs over that time frame.
Every ISP I know of here (centurylink (qwest before buyout), att, and xmission) will gladly sell you static IP addresses on residential connections. Not 1, but a block of 16 or 32 (heck xmission will give you a full class C for just $60/mo).
Why on earth would you buy a block of 16 IPs if you can't host servers on them?
Now, since its not a business class service, you wouldn't want to put anything that needs super high availability on this connection, but thats perfectly understood, I'm hosting a few personal web sites, a couple blogs, a code repository, and a minecraft server... If the rest of the country really is so seriously locked down against having a mail server in your basement, I guess I better not move ever.
That's the point. If you want to pay for the bandwidth to run a server business, you buy business class. You want residential, you pay residential. You try to run a business on residential, that's leeching.
you are confused.
first of all, we paid the telcoms *billions* of dollars in the 1990s to provide us with high speed networking. guess what they did with that money instead?
now we get 1/20 or less the bandwidth of the rest of the world.
the bandwidth leeches are the telecoms.
if I am paying for x mBytes down and y kbytes up, there is no ambiguity about what that means I am paying for (and note again, fhese rates are *pitifully slow*)
so no, we're not to cry you a river about what the lines can carry. those LEECHES, who have stolen billions from we the taxpayer and we the subscribers, can upgrade their gear so they can provide what they claim to have sold us.
quit being a shill for the LEECHES
Ok then... Firstly, I am not confused. I merely stated two facts. One, that shared residential lines can have their bandwidth clogged by abusers, or "leechers". Two, that this debate is not a net neutrality one; it's about business and advertising.
Strike that, actually. I am confused. I am confused as to how an ad hominem attack got modded +5 insightful.
You call me a shill, but would it surprise you to know that I agree pretty much with everything you said? (Apart from the ad hominem, of course.) I would absofrakkinglutely love some honesty and transparency from ISPs overselling their shared connections.
However, as I said, this is a matter of advertising, not net neutrality. If they don't claim to offer "unlimited" internet, then their competitors will, and the customers will jump ship. So, because, they advertise "unlimited", they have to pull stunts like the "no servers" clause so that people don't clog up their networks and piss off other customers. I am not defending this. I do not agree with this. I am merely stating the situation.
On another note, why is it that Google is held to a higher standard than other companies? These practices are extremely commonplace, however much I wish they weren't. If it were some other ISP, there would be (and indeed there have not been) a story in every tech news site about a ToS. But because it's Google, they can magically "do no wrong"? So when they do what every other major US ISP does, it's suddenly news? People need to realize that Google is just another company, and stop acting surprised when they behave like one.
Google's making the same mistake that so many ISPs make, except they don't have the same excuses to fall back on. DSL and cable can experience congestion at such a level as to render some nodes near-unusable. But 1Gbps fiber (with likely 10Gbps or 40Gbps backbone)? There's no excuse. You have excess network, so start acting like it.
So you're experiencing congestion. Why not sell QoS to the people who really need their VoIP trunk or Minecraft server to be zippy? Cutting to the head of the line for a few bucks a month seems like something that would fly off the virtual shelves. If your bandwidth bills are too high, start selling packages for high-bandwidth users. On-net transfer is practically free, and off-net transfer for someone of Google's size can't be more than $0.012 per GB. Charge $0.02 per GB and make a small killing selling at reasonable rates. Heck, set your month caps at 2TB (XMission does 1TB on UTOPIA) and ding both Comcast and CenturyLink for their 250GB monthly caps. ISPs often leave this kind of money on the table for what I think most of us would consider reasonable add-on services.
And for those of you saying to get commercial connections, are you daft? Google doesn't offer business connections. (They keep saying Real Soon Now(TM), but I'll believe it when I see it.) Anyway, you're saying that if the Civic isn't meeting your needs, you should go buy a Porsche. What if what I really need is a Lexus? Too bad, so sad.
It's really hard to define a server anyway. If I run CrashPlan and let friends back up to my NAS, am I running a server? If I let my mom stream media from my Plex box, am I running a server? If I choose to seed the latest Ubuntu ISO on bitTorrent for any length of time, am I running a server? We can hope that Google is kind enough to look the other way if our usage is light enough, but that's always risky business.
For how much they've sold Google Fiber as being innovative, they sure are doing a lot to clamp down on novel uses. My how the tune has changed in just three years.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Back when I was in grad school there were two guys collecting links into a nice sorted directory. Stanford hosted it for quite a while until it took up 50+% of the entire network bandwidth and the school decided that Yahoo! had to become a real company. Nobody stopped Napster or Bittorrent (technically)
Google's not stopping you from developing the next great thing, nor will they lower the priority of your packets when you do. They just don't want you doing it on a line that the TOS specifically says you can't.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I'm not an expert with all this technology and stuff, but it seems that this does not "violate" net neutrality. I was under that the impression that net neutrality is concerned with the content of data sent/received, not with company policies that limit large amounts of traffic (or servers or whatever), regardless of the type of data being sent through.
Of course, a company could violate net neutrality by banning specific servers or censoring information that they don't like, but I don't see how splitting up your "business" and "residential" service has anything to do with freedom of information. Can someone explain to me exactly why this is a violation of net neutrality? It sounds more to me like many of you are upset because of false advertisement, or even simply because you think something should be free when it's not.
As far as evilness goes... meh. Evil, to me, is synonymous to greed. And, to varying degrees, just about everybody in our country and every other country is greedy. It comes with the territory. ;)
Yes, bash on Google for stating what they did, but pretty much NO ISP provider to home connections allow servers on them. They never have. So keep ranting about how evil google is now, even though this isn't anything new. Upgrade to a business class if you want to run a server.
Be seeing you...
Almost every company has T&Cs that offer them quick & easy ways to fire you as a customer. You're frothing at the mouth over something near to meaningless.
If you've got evidence of Google kicking off customers for running their own private mail server or OpenArena server. Please present it.
By presenting this as a net neutrality issue you're exposing yourself as a deluded "but, but, it's the principle of the thing!" idealist. Maybe you should come back to the real world.
Personally, I'm glad that service providers have clauses to make sure that people aren't running high traffic servers on the internet server that I share with them. If they need that kind of access they should be putting their servers in a datacentre like the rest of us. Not degrading home internet to save a few bucks.
I believe that when Google was young, as a whole it really did believe in ideals such as "Don't be evil". I don't think anyone would publicly adopt such a motto which is so easy to ridicule unless they really meant to stick to it. Their actions in the early years also largely support this view.
However, as Google matured as a money-making corporation, its character gradually changed. Idealists left and more corporate hardened souls were taken on. In some ways, this is not unlike the process of growing up from an idealistic teenager living in a world of absolutes to an adult having financial commitments and facing temptations to cut corners to meet the bottom line.
I think that there is a struggle internally now within Google for its soul- whether it should stick to its ideals and risk financial loss, or take the easy way and act like every other company out there and prioritise profit.
We can, hopefully, reverse the trend by reminding Google (loudly) of its ideals and perhaps shaming them into acting better. Although Google is sliding towards the evil side of the scale, it is still way too early to give up on them. Think of Google as a wayward child verging into criminality; you can either write them off and ensure that another hardened criminal joins the world, or try to teach them what is wrong and hopefully, maybe they will change for the better.
Google has a valid interest in preventing the acts of one user from affecting the enjoyment of other users.
The basic reason for network neutrality was to prevent carriers from preventing future applications for happening.
(For example Comcast peventing OTT services from providing video alternatives.)
It seems fair to have a different level of service for a business user other than incidental working at home.
What I don't see is how a personal server can would either affect the enjoyment of others or raise the business issue.
(If someone wants to put up a web server with noticable public traffic, that seems a different matter.)
Additionally, it seems like building new peer to peer aps which require servers is a reasonable expectation for how the Internet might evolve.
For these reasons, Google might want to rethink their position to one that is more logically defendable.
The fig leaf of 'Reasonable Network Management' in the light of the Net Neutrality history seems inadequate.
The excuse the others are doing it does not make it ok for anybody.
Companies don't exist to be nice, they exist to make money for their owners and shareholders.
And this shabby excuse has been used time and again to justify the many evils companies inflict on the world in their pursuit of profit. Such as Union Carbide's poisoning of India.
There was a time before companies existed, when businesses bore the names of their founders such as Walter & Sons. Often the owners refrained from acts of outright evil because they did not want to taint their name, and their sons and grandsons similarly restrained themselves so as not to soil their grandfather's name. If that was not sufficient deterrent, the fact that they were held personally liable often did.
With the creation of companies, responsibility became diffused. Bad things were done by 'the company' -except that this was a lie. Companies do not have independent will, their actions are dictated by management who often disappear after collecting their fat bonuses.
It is too late now to argue companies should nto exist- they do, and are here to stay. But since companies enjoy the status of separate legal entities, they should be judged accordingly. If an individual behaves in an evil manner, I judge them evil, and the same with companies. If an individual commits evil to get rich, I would not excuse his behaviour if his excuse was that his sole aim in life was to get rich. We should also not accept the same excuse for companies. Do evil, be judged evil, no excuses.
What on earth do you actually do with that kind of throughput then?
And Jesus Tapdancing Christ, you're comparing modern advancements to something invented in the fucking 60's, man. You may as well say, "buy the best i7 you can, but it better not do anything better than UNIVAC, cause otherwise, whip-buggy manufacturers might go out of business".
In effect, you've advocated uselessness.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
I have cookies turned on and therefore serve them up. Wouldn't that alone qualify as server activity?
I know its fashionable to hate on Google right now, but isn't TFA saying things Google didn't say?
For example, TFA claims:-
But if you look at Google's actual response, they say :-
'Should not' carries a very different meaning from 'Must not'. The first provides guidelines, the second is an absolute ban.
TFA fans the flames by telling users that clause stops them from using Google Fiber from doing a lot of things most people would not consider to be unfair use, such as :-
However Google did not say that any of uses were prohibited. What Google does say in its response is that :-
There are many things Google does that I dislike (give me back iGoogle!) but lets crucify them for what they do, not made-up tales/fears.
Running the web server the come with every OS is the whole reason to internet. Otherwise the whole internet is just one giant advertising fuck that. I would never log on to the internet again if that comes true. Dare the owner of any ISP to tell the world how what I just said to this is not true.
I am hoping someone can answer that, because I've seen many many different definitions, most of which favour whoever is doing the defining at that time.
Does it refer to a theoretical view of network architecture, in which every packet is treated identically regardless of its origin or the nature of its content -- data, voice, or video?
Is it a set of guarantees/rights for consumers that they will not be constrained in any way from accessing the lawful content of their choice?
Or, is it a set of protections (via FCC's rules) for content providers to ensure they are not unfairly disadvantaged by ISPs that may also offer competing content, including television programming and on-demand movies?
Google's not stopping you from developing the next great thing, nor will they lower the priority of your packets when you do. They just don't want you doing it on a line that the TOS specifically says you can't.
disclosure: complainant here. And I'm pointing out that the Network Neutrality rules forbid the blocking of traffic to *any/all* legal devices. They don't get to, either in their switches and routers, or in their terms of service, decide that my linux pc running an openarena server has less worthy traffic than my neighbor uploading lol-cat videos to youtube. Otherwise the network operators would be in too great a position to effectively shape and dominate the internet devices marketplace. Which of course they'd all love to do. Even Google.
Read your TOS, idiot.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Generally when I think about the "Net Neutrality" issue, I tend to think more of ISP's restricting where traffic can go out to, rather than preventing one from running webservers for incoming connections.
However, if we start with webservers, then how about torrent clients (which have bi-directional traffic) or the many other services that are essentially server/client oriented?
How about hosting game servers?
Neutral is neutral. Google can charge you for the pipe, but unless I'm doing something malicious with it (note: not what they don't like, but something criminal), they can fuck right off.
Do you know what NBNCo charge for data (CVC)? $20Mbps / month. That means wholesale the cheapest plan would be 12/1Mbps @ $24 AVC + 12 * $20 CVC = $284/month to NBNCo, plus ISP's cost and profit margin. ISPs are left with three choices: expensive prices, congestion or quotas.
- Expensive prices don't work
- Congestion doesn't work well because people who only want a small amount of data leave, meaning the remaining customers are heavy downloaders, who might stay
- Quotas work because people causing the congestion pay for the upgrades to remove it
I realise this may not apply to the US because of monopoly providers, but it works well in Australia.
If my ISP says I get 1Mbps upstream, it shouldn't matter if those upstream packets are acks to a fast download, or data packets being sent out by a server on my network. Net neutrality says that packets are packets.
Here, I even do your homework for you.
Read technical restrictions section about Comcast residential service :
http://www.comcast.com/Corporate/Customers/Policies/HighSpeedInternetAUP.html
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If I'm not allowed to use a connection continuously at it's peak capacity, then write the exact limit in bandwidth terms into the contract
Comcast does exactly this, wording its terms to mean roughly a 250 GB/mo CIR burstable to 12 Mbps.
My connection is described as X Mbps upstream and Y Mbps downstream (where Y > X).
It really shouldn't matter if my upstream packets are acks to downstream data, or contain data from my server being requested by the outside world. Packets are packets, and if I'm supposed to get X upstream bandwidth, I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
An ISP provides the ability to transfer packets between my home and the rest of the internet. As long as I'm within the speeds (and data cap) that I paid for, Net Neutrality says that it shouldn't matter what is actually in those packets.
To say that I'm not allowed to run a low-volume mail server is just a money grab, since I could use *way* more bandwidth watching netflix all day.
All my other utilities have fixed monthly costs for basic access and a variable cost based on consumption. There's really no reason why you couldn't do the same for Internet access.
That's the point. If you want to pay for the bandwidth to run a server business, you buy business class. You want residential, you pay residential. You try to run a business on residential, that's leeching.
Huh?
If I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. I don't pay for X amount divided between N users. If the ISP can't provide the bandwidth that they are selling me then they need to tell me about it. To do otherwise is being deceitful.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
That's the point. If you want to pay for the bandwidth to run a server business, you buy business class. You want residential, you pay residential. You try to run a business on residential, that's leeching.
No, if I buy an internet connection from an ISP and it says it is "unlimited" then I expect to be able to use all the bandwidth available for whatever purpose I want. If they don't want me downloading an "unlimited" amount of data then they can stop advertising it as "unlimited".
Now, I'm of the opinion that uncapped download limits are utterly unsustainable - I steer clear of ISPs advertising "unlimited" connections because such a connection would be one of three things:
1. A con - not actually unlimited because there would be some "fair usage" clause in there somewhere.
2. Far too expensive - a truely "unlimited" connection would cost the ISP more to provide than I could afford to pay.
3. Extremely low quality - if a connection is both cheap and unlimited, the only possible way this can work is to have an extremely high contention ratio.
So when I choose an ISP, I go for one with a sensible cap which fits my needs - I don't *need* unlimited downloads and don't want to subsidise the people who do. However, if my ISP tells me I have a 100GB/month cap then just like the "unlimited" option above, they should expect me to use up to 100GB/month for whatever I like.
Honestly, ISPs should just learn to set price tiers for the bandwidth people actually use instead of misadvertising what they are offering and then trying to gouge people for extra money by placing ounerous terms in their T&Cs. When I go to the shop for some milk, I get a 2 litre bottle of milk - I don't come back with "unlimited" milk that will see me penalised if I use more than 2 litres of it and I don't have to sign some terms and conditions saying that the milk is for home use only and that I won't use it in my morning cup of tea at work.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Data volume and net neutrality are separate issues. If home servers serve up tons, then we're back to the "unlimited" plan issue with peer-to, wait, peer2peer.
But some small business or hobby server that otherwise doesn't stress the system as much as 30s of YouTube does, screw that.
Don't Be Evil*
*Disclaimer: This trademark does not give specific, reliable assurance of the status of any Google activities on the Dungeons & Dragons alignment space.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This situation reminds me of the time I worked for a Telco; the first Telco to offer consumer ADSL in the UK (Not BT).
The majority of the early adopters were computer buffs that wanted to run web servers on the line and we did nothing to prevent them in practice or the contract.
However we still got a myriad of complaints they simply could not grasp the point the ADSL was asymmetric and the entire business model was built on that fact. ADSL was designed to be a consumer service for fast internet access, not hosting.
This situation still applies today, even with fibre services to the home that are symmetric. The providers infrastructure is tailored/profiled to be asymmetric. It is optimised to provide the optimum service the the majority of customers, who are mostly consuming content.
Fibre to the Home is a fundamentally different 'product' to that needed to host web servers.
A fibre to the home service is still basically an asymmetric download service (even when the final hop is sold as symmetric), because that is how the provides infrastructure is manage to provide the optimum service.
The fibre used for hosting provides may be asymmetric but that will be outboard traffic, symmetric, or even more expensively actively managed symmetry.
Most definitions of a server, propose that it supports a number of clients.
Therefore most of the edge case used by Wired are not servers and IMHO fall into the category of either peers or perhaps (private) proxies.
Your reasoning fails on the grounds that mobile devices have become common, giving people, even non-commercially, the legitimate and perfectly reasonable desire to connect their mobile devices and their home systems from anywhere. Plenty of private functions operate as services and can be made available via the internet from even the most basic of home computers.
Running your own tinytiny-rss server from your desktop would be something that reasonably would appeal to a mobile device user without being commercial or even allowing more users than yourself. Playing Team Fortress 2 with friends on your "server" is certainly noncommercial. And to be sure, many blogs are entirely noncommercial and could reasonably be hosted noncommercially from one's home system.
Trying to pretend all "servers" are commercial is pure nonsense.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Can I hate google from now? Or maybe, I most wait a little bit longer?
now they can say you support their opinion on this Net Neutrality matter, as well.
I have had 3 different home ISPs in the last 10 years. None of them disallowed servers. I made sure of that before I bought the service.
It's a lie, probably put here by The Cable Guys. NN says I will not charge your packets differentially according to how deep your pocketbooks are. Google Fiber ToS says that we're not going to give you unlimited data for unlimited people who piggyback off your account. These are two completely different issues. Completely. Different.
Most of the conflict between "personal" and "business" comes when a service is provisioned for a relatively light load (residential) and then someone runs a business on it. The service just isn't designed to carry that much traffic, that incurs additional expenses which aren't within the residential fee structure.
If the service is metered, as you link to here, then they don't care how much traffic you run, they'll get paid more if you run a server and that'll provide the revenue needed to provision the line up for the higher traffic.
If American ISP service was metered, there wouldn't be much of an issue either. If you use it like a business, you'd pay like a business.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If you read your own link, you would have seen that it specifically allows for personal, non-commercial use, which is what most people are running from their home.
For what it's worth, I ran a local motorcycling club website for years from my residential Comcast account and never had any issues. I accepted inbound port 80, 443 and 22 traffic. They don't allow outbound port 25 traffic, but they do allow you to send SMTP after authenticating with your Comcast credentials. I was sending emails from my own domain through Comcast's servers.
Want commercial grade connection? pay for it. And that has been the case for ages, here (not america) isp:s disallowed servers on home connections while we most were still on dial-up due to (or at least, that was what they *said*) adsl owners unwittingly serving spam. And I've been told Comcast et al. do exactly the same thing.
Not exactly. Comcast has bandwidth limits that apply to upload and download amounts on consumer accounts. It's Net-Neutral in that regard.
Google is providing faster upload speeds than most other offerings, but is telling consumers HOW they are allowed to use it. That isn't neutral.
Judging quantity is a neutral measure (though it might not be popular). Judging the content of what travels over the lines is not neutral.
Worse, in this era of IPv4 address exhaustion, some ISPs offer what amounts to a /40. The IP address your CPE sees is in one of the ranges reserved for private internets, and your external IP is shared with a couple hundred other users behind a carrier-grade NAT. Pings, UDP datagrams, and incoming TCP connections just don't make it to your machine. This is more common in some countries than in others.
BTW, that is not from Google Translate ;)
(Emphasis by me). This sounds more like a "it would be nice if you don't" to me. Heck, even RFC 2119 agrees:
"Consumer" access is not access to the Internet. It's access to some of the Internet. If an ISP wants to advertise Internet access, the contract needs to offer Internet access.
Good luck defining typical geek server usage without an enforceable TOS.
Including both the upstream and the downstream in the quoted monthly cap would suffice.
I've only heard one good argument about why net neutrality should be enforced by law, and that's [last mile] monopolies. That argument actually makes sense. But if that's your position, then you don't want the FCC involved, you want the FTC.
So your complaint is that the FTC has chosen to delegate enforcement of competition law on communications providers to the Federal Communications Commission.
CronoCloud told me you're supposed to move, get a job with an established developer, work at it for a few years, and then start your own company that can afford to lease a dedicated server.
Or in the real world, just lease a VPS to run your game server. Or make your game single-player. Or make your game use same-screen multiplayer with multiple gamepads plugged into one PC or one OUYA console.
Why doesn't competition take care of the unavailability of attractive contracts?
Thanks for the heads up.
You know, it took a while before Mr. Ford figured out just what the automobile industry needed to progress. I still hold that usage-based prioritization is the way to go, but it is sadly comforting to know that there are pioneers out there trying to make it work. (or were... Hopefully there still are.)
100GB and 101GB are not significantly different in terms of what the ISP pays, but is significantly different in how they charge. That's abusive. I know that you're right in the point that you're making, but the way that argument is usually used is a very bad excuse to penalize legitimate usage.
Even assuming the upstream problem is intractable (I have my doubts), they ought to charge upstream cost + <2% for going over quota. I can't figure out how they can rationalize otherwise. These punitive fees are not excusable.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
You can over-sell your back-haul as data usage at large trunks is very stable, even when highly over-subscribed. It's the last-mile that you can't over-subscribe because there are not enough users at those points to make a smooth average.
The amount of data you use has no bearing on cost or load, only when you use or how fast you burst. Quick high-speed bursts are much easier and cheaper than long drawn-out transfers. You essentially have to use 95th percentile to effectively charge people, but you can't pre-pay on 95th percentile, because you won't know what it is until after the billing period. Then you have the whole issue of monitoring every customer and trying to explain to them how it works
Even then, someone consuming a steady 1Gb/s from midnight to 11am will still cost an ISP less than someone transferring 1Mb/s for 2 hours during 5pm-11pm.
Essentially, it comes down to that the individual does not matter, only the group as a whole matters. So if the group determines costs and not the individual, you can't charge people individually, but as a group.
What ISPs are doing to high data usage customer is that if you are too many sigmas from the norm, then you're not longer part of the group, so you cannot get the group rate. Instead you get the individual rate, which is much more expensive, aka Business customers.
QoS is more expensive to implement than adding bandwidth in most cases. If you're going to offer artificially limited services, data-caps are the way to go.
On another note, why is it that Google is held to a higher standard than other companies?
Because for a long time they not only advertised that they supported the principles of the Internet, they also looked like they actually meant it. They seemed to have made respecting the Internet environment a part of their business model. They seemed to have found a niche that was win-win between them and userland. And honestly, for a long time they did pretty good with that.
Honestly, I'm disappointed. Not really surprised, but somewhat disappointed nonetheless.
There's nothing like $HOME
Anything's more expensive than offering good service. Your point is?
Most carrier grade equipment already does some form of QoS. Yeah, they'll need to insert custom code somewhere and that will cost R&D, but chances are most large ISPs won't need new hardware.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Addendum: if a large ISP needs to replace equipment to gain packet prioritization, chances are they already need to replace their ancient equipment!
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Only if you're using something like DOCSIS cable - ADSL and FTTH have dedicated last-mile links per user.