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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.
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?!?
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).
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
If you have voting shareholders, you are evil. If you do not, you are probably evil.
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!
bullshit, typical geek "server" (domain with email and http server, maybe IRC or somesuch) uses negligible amount of the bandwidth of the home user who streams videos and/or plays multiplayer games.
google can go fuck themselves and die in a fire, I've been running a "server" on my home network since the mid 90s, which accounted for less than 1% of my traffic.
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.
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
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)
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 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.
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.
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.