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Google Fiber Partially Reverses Server Ban
Lirodon writes "After being called out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for banning the loosely-defined use of "servers" on its Fiber service, Google appears to have changed its tune, and now allows 'personal, non-commercial use of servers that complies with this AUP is acceptable, including using virtual private networks (VPN) to access services in your home and using hardware or applications that include server capabilities for uses like multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, and home security.'"
Same as most ISPs have and for the same reason. The big difference was google did a lot of fighting specifically against that kinda thing.
Haven't actually read the new TOS, but from summary this sounds reasonable enough.
Realistically this is usually how this ends up actually working with most ISPs anyway. I've yet to hear of an ISP cutting off someones connection for running a minecraft server.
It still contrasts the "bit are bits" argument, but my pragmatic side is willing to accept that we may need an artificial tier in there to keep prices low for non-business users.
but does google offer google fiber for businesses for those who want to host their own servers ? Or the only service they offer is for home users ?
so they can sell business access at more expensive price. you didn't seriously think that they were just acting as a dumb pipe providing you bandwidth to use as you see fit?
though nowadays when actual definitions between server and client can be a bit murky it's a bit finicky. playing certain games online? well, you may or you may not be a server..
another reason is that they can cut off people who actually use the bandwidth, just because they advertise xx MB/s doesn't really mean they're prepared to provide it. if they had a hard limit on transfers they would need to divulge you with that information and then you would know what you're buying. much better when it's all murky and the customers have to keep second guessing.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I think server bans started back when everyone and his brother starting hosting porn sites and killing what used to be very limited bandwidth. Not as big a problem these days, but I can see why there needs to be some limitation. Otherwise they might need to start charging for usage.
OTOH, if you do host a web page, I bet Google will have no problem indexing i, and showing Ads along side search result hits......
Maybe so, but Comcast cut off my friend for running a low-volume mail server. The definition of "server" is intentionally left vague in the TOS. That allows the ISPs to single out users for any reason they want, without having to be specific or consistent.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
It still contrasts the "bit are bits" argument, but my pragmatic side is willing to accept that we may need an artificial tier in there to keep prices low for non-business users.
I don't. Google's wholesale cost for ip transit is probably around $6 per terabyte - wholesale cost was about $12 a year ago and its been falling by 50% for the last 4-5 years.
If they are worried about losing money, then set a threshold like 5TB/month and then start charging wholesale plus minimum necessary mark-up for anything over that.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It was probably thrown in by lawyers that don't know the difference between a web server and a file server. My ISP has a similar clause, that I mostly ignore. My wife and I don't generate enough traffic to my home servers to even make a blip. What the ISPs are concerned with are people having commercial servers generating massive amounts of traffic and money, but the people running the servers are paying the residential rate instead of the much more expensive commercial rates. Essentially the ISP wants a cut of any money someone could be generating from a home server for the use of the extra bandwidth (that wouldn't be allocated otherwise).
Of course, I'm glad to see the policy nixed (like I'll ever get Google fiber), but I think it's rare we give companies props for reversing decisions we've nuked them for. So, go Google. Way not to be evil.
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You sound like you don't know what you are talking about because wholesale suppliers typically charge per the amount of bandwidth available, not the amount actually downloaded. For example a 1Mbps link of UNCONTENDED bandwidth might cost $400 per month, regardless of whether it is utilised or not. It is then up to the ISP to share it among all their customers at a ratio that is not noticeable slow. To Limit the link from being saturated by all customers using it at once they put in certain restrictions designed to reduce usage such as download and/or upload quotas, P2P throttling or business server use, unless they pay more to reflect that more usage would cost them more in backhaul so that other users are not bought down.
The technology they provide could very easily support a high-bandwidth server that pulls a constant 1Mbps+ in network utilisation, and Google would need to increase their backhaul by that 1Mbps+ so that other users are not affected, because nobody else can use that 1Mbps while that connection is being sustained.
As a Network Security architect in a big ISP, I can tell you that one of the biggest threat to network security is all those compromised servers installed by anyone who can read a random howto on the internet...
It's just boilerplate legal speak put into the contracts. It was never meant to ban what they are explicitly excluding now, it was just put in to differentiated between commercial and residential service. They wanted a line in the contract to throw at you if you abused to the service for commercial use, so far as I know no one was ever booted by their ISP for running a VPN or hosting a multi-player game (though occasionally their networks settings made it difficult to do things).
It's not "nowadays" it was baked into the internet from day one. It's a peer-to-peer network where it's expected that a node may appear as a server in one context and a client in the next. These clauses are only written into ISP contracts with an eye to forcing residential customers who generate 'too much' traffic to pay more for business, but once that tool is there in the contract it's only a matter of time before it is used more generally. And it makes no sense. They should just define specifically what the limits of the service is instead of writing in nebulous language about servers that could mean anything a lawyer wants them to mean.
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That right there is the whole thing in a nutshell.
On the other hand, I'm a little bit sympathetic to "make the thing first, then work out the details" because if I had to hammer out every detail, every contingency of the things I do before I do them, I'd never get anything done.
However, when you get the size of Google and have that much of a bigfoot-effect from everything you do, there is a fairly substantial responsibility to define parameters. Because other people depend on you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Any provider that bans "servers" is not providing internet access. They are providing media consumption access. They should be forced to very clearly differentiate that as a type of service provided.
Internet access is unconstainted IP packets. Both TCP and UDP and whatever other protocol you want.
I often wonder why anybody would want to run a commercial business venture off a home connection.
Probably not intentionally. I have a friend that started up a small consulting business in his spare time. He initially just used a FTP server to provide completed project files to his very small customer base (it started off as 3 people). After about six years he's pretty well doing his consulting full time, he had to hire on someone to help out with paper work and data entry and is now looking at having a commercial server since he's dealing with nearly a hundred clients. It's still not a big start up, but he's realized the number of files he serves has grown exponentially to the number of clients/projects he's taken on and is starting to feel the growing pains. All he needs now is for the ISP to step in and cut off his connection because he's using a server, so he's shopping around at the moment for a better option.
Many reasons. You may want to have a web cam, temperature station or other local data source connected to the net*. You may want to host a game server. A number of applications effectively act as servers even though they're really just applications in practice.
And at least where I am, you never pay per Mb for wired internet. I just pay an extra $10 (or thereabouts) per month to get a fixed IP address from my provider, and I can use it for anything non-commercial.
* Why? For fun.
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Seeding a torrent to 100% without leasing a seedbox is running a server at home. Being player 1 in an online game is running a server at home. Using GoToMyPC or LogMeIn or any other sort of remote desktop is running a server at home. Sharing a large (tens of GB) collection of photos or other files with family members (or with yourself, just in case you're on another computer and need the files off yours) without leasing a VPS and uploading them all, expecting that most won't be downloaded, is running a server at home.
There isn't much demand for Internet access at home, apart from the edge cases that inhabit Slashdot.
Because Google don't want you running your own services. They want to you to be using their e-mail and other services. Giving people all that bandwidth and allowing them to run what they like on their own negates their business model.
There was a server ban? What for?
Yes and No.
Yes, in that saying "No servers" is standard for any residential TOS from any ISP.
No, in that almost nobody actually enforces the ban on "servers" for things like VPN's, remote access, personal "servers" for things like playing games, and other small-scale things which could still be called a "server".
Yes, in that you can't run any kind of commercial-grade type server, business use server, etc.
Kudos to Google for actually changing the language of the TOS, instead of relying on a "gentleman's agreement" like most ISP's do.
Do you have reliable sources for that number?
No he doesn't, because there are no reliable sources. Any time you go out to purchase bandwidth you sit down and talk to a sales rep from the company who you're looking to buy from, you tell them what you're looking for, when, and where, and they prepare a quote for you.
The actual cost of the bandwidth varies a LOT, based on a wide variety of factors. What's the physical distance between endpoints? Are you buying dark fiber? An ethernet circuit? A wave circuit? Do you want protection? What kind of uptime/SLA do you require? Perhaps you're buying more than one circuit, if so maybe you're asking for each to have a diverse path. Are you picking these up at co-location facilities, or do you need them run all the way out to a data center? Are you adding to an existing bundle, or is this all completely new? How long of a contract term do you want?
The sales rep takes all that, looks at how much bandwidth they have to sell, looks at their upcoming plans for adding their own capacity, looks at competition, and gives you a number.
I've seen a single copper T1 go for twice what an OC-192 sold for, due to differences in SLA, geography, distance, and contract length. Anybody who tries to just tell you that fiber costs "$X" is either bullshitting you or simply doesn't know what they're talking about.
It's not a matter of 100 Mbps or 25 Mbps.
You can download something at 100 Mbps and in ten seconds you'll be done. Your neighbor can then use that SAME 100 Mbps of capacity for a few seconds. So you, your neighbor, and 98 other people all get 100 Mbps when you want it. At 100 Mbps, it takes you a lot longer to read a web page than it does to load it, and a lot longer to listen to a song than to download it. You use zero Mbps when you're sleeping, at work, running errands, cooking dinner - overall you use the bandwidth about 1% of the time.
Compare that to if eBay connected their servers to Google fiber connections. Servers would be using the bandwidth all the time. It couldn't be shared with neighbors, so Google would need to add dedicated capacity just for those servers. That costs alot more to have it all to yourself versus sharing with 99 other people.
If you can't run servers on it? I can't imagine using even a fraction of that unless I'm running some kinds of servers out of my house.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Some of us run servers that receive mail.
so far as I know no one was ever booted by their ISP for running a VPN or hosting a multi-player game (though occasionally their networks settings made it difficult to do things).
The second reason for a written ban was so that when you complained that their network settings were making it difficult to run your multi-player game server, they could say "you aren't supposed to be doing that" and they could ignore you, instead of waste, I means expend, engineer time fixing it.
As I used to. My previous ISP blocked port 25 outbound which is fine, since there were so many spam bots out there. My current one is blocking port 25 inbound, which is just plain pointless. Thankfully, Google Apps were still free and I'm using them as a glorified port redirector.
You were saying low-volume and you have no control over inbound - so I made the likely assumption. Of course technically outbound email is a client connection, but most of that's usually done by MTA servers acting as clients and the email clients are connecting via a non-standard port anyway.
Most people running mail servers at home use their ISP's SMTP servers to send outgoing mail while receiving mail directly. This lets the ISP watch for (and control) spammy customers while still allowing the customers to manage everything else themselves.
Comcast has recently been cracking down on residential customers that do this, even if there is no spam involved. In many regions, they've started blocking inbound port 25, which has nothing to do with blocking spam.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
> If i put up a moderate website, i doubt that'll get more than 1 gigabyte of traffic a month.
We did 600 GB - in 1997, before there was any video on the web. A GB is 1/4th of a DVD iso.
Our "half server" plans include a terabyte for each of the two customers on a server. (Meaning 2TB per 1U server.)
One guy I work with - one guy, working out of his house, has a site that never drops below 100 Mbps. It peaks at around 400 Mbps.
> servers do not use 100% of the bandwidth all the time. There is no service that i'm aware of that will use a full 1gbit link 100% of the time.
Their average use, for a typical web site, is 40%-50% of their peak. A site provisioned for 1 Gbps will use about 300,000 GBs, while a
residential customer might use 10 GBs. See why one costs more than the other?
It's more a way to make residential users think they're getting a lot more than they really are and pursing 'value based*' pricing.
Specifically, offer unlimited with big speed ratings knowing very well that the whole thing will come crashing down if they actually (god forbid) use even a fraction of what is offered.
Then ban anything that might actually cause a user to use a significant amount of what they have paid for. At the time it started, that was servers. As long as they didn't have a server, they would remain low use.
* NOTE: in a healthy market, value based pricing is impossible to maintain. Market forces will drive the price down to the marginal cost of production. The only place for 'value' in that computation is that if the value is below the cost of production, the product/service won't be produced at all. Further note that this implies that a great many markets are unhealthy these days.
It's more that people have more need for download capacity than upload capacity, and there are so many channels that can be bound to. Though a modem could technically be setup with more upstream... Youtube, Netflix, Hulu and the like as down streams far outweigh typical upstream requirements. Also, what's so horrible about having some market segmentation between commercial and residential services. I happen to have both a commercial and residential service setup in my home.. my servers are on the business connection with a routed /28 block. Internally, I have a dual network on the same routers, so I just bind an internal IP and external on the servers, and have the firewall allow different relay rules from the non-commercial systems.
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The linked site says that it's OK to use the fiber for business if you're running a "small" business FROM YOUR HOME.
Terms-of-use cut is whether you LIVE there (apparently as a primary residence, not camping out at the office) rather than the site being an office-only.
I suspect they might waffle if you set up the next e-bay/facebook/netflix class service in your back room. But for people like me, with a consulting business, it would be just fine - and explicitly allowed - to use the fiber for mail service, VLAN-on-the-road, etc.
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