Google Argues Against Net Neutrality 555
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."
the fine print (Score:5, Informative)
here is what they were responding to-
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/mcclendon_notice_of_informal_complaint.pdf [cloudsession.com]
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf [cloudsession.com]
Misleading Article (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Misleading Article (Score:1, Informative)
If you'd read the article, citing what other broadband companies do is exactly the defense Google responded with, but that policy contradicts their previous position on net neutrality.
Re:Another failure of "unlimited" bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)
I think it actually is net neutrality (of course, since I'm the complainant). However what you subsequently said is all spot-on. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to claim "unlimited bandwidth" in advertising, then not deliver it to the people smart enough to lawfully take advantage of it. In some circles such misleading advertising is known as "fraud".
Re:FCC Troll? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:FCC Troll? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:Don't be evil (some of the time) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Just like Comcast and most other providers.
You can't run anything that accepts inbound connections. Even SSH is frowned upon.
Pay up for their business class service and all of the objections disappear.
The ONLY reason for this prohibition is money grubbing by the carriers. They sold it based on spam, but applied it to everything, even game servers.
Re:Misleading Article (Score:5, Informative)
Here in Australia there are very few ISPs that have such a restriction. Most are completely silent on the issue (and thus permit servers).
Of course, residential ISPs generally give you a dynamic IP which isn't very useful for hosting purposes (DynDNS or equivalents notwithstanding) and charge some extra fee (e.g. +$10/month) for a static one. So they make extra money off the customers doing any serious form of hosting anyway.
But yeah, the "don't run servers" clause in ISP terms of service seems to mostly be a North American thing. I've used dozens of ISPs in Australia, NZ and various European countries and never come across such a clause.
Troll much? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's like pornography. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:the fine print (Score:2, Informative)
Come on, Google has been fooling the geeks for quite some time now. It's not Google, it's the structure. All publicly floated companies act on the same logic. The human spirit behind "don't be evil" is long gone, it's been assimilated into the borg. It is now a function of marketing.
Re:Troll much? (Score:3, Informative)
your analogy is flawed. I buy ten gallons of gasoline it doesn't matter whether I put it in car, or bus or chainsaw.
a "server" may or may not be commercial. if it uses a negligible portion of the bandwidth compared to videos and torrents and games, so what? it doesn't hurt the ISP any.
No, it is simple economics (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Don't be evil (some of the time) (Score:5, Informative)
No? Hows this: We pay them (a lot) for listings on Google Base (shopping.) We take our own product photos, in our own photo lab, usually as some kind of action shot, and we copyright and watermark every one before the jpeg hits the server or is sent along to Google as the product image. Google's latest to us? We're supposed to remove all of these watermarks / sigils so Google can use OUR images to advertise OTHER company's products. We've presently got about 40,000 watermarked images. They gave us two weeks to "remove" the watermarks, as if they were stuck on with bubble gum.
I think we're going to drop Google Base, actually, over this one. It's an unreliable product that never has worked very well, and certainly no better since they started charging for it. But this last bit about making us remove our marks from our own images...
Fuck them.
Re:As someone who HASN'T (Score:5, Informative)
While I have an android device, it hasn't got google play/appstore, login, nor data service to it... Android 4.3's restrictions, google's no-server limitations, etc are all pushing the masses towards sheepitude...
This sounds confused. Just about the only android devices that don't have data service are e-readers, which are pretty safe from any evil impositions. As for Android 4.3, the restrictions are for profiles that *you* impose. If it's a single user device, you don't have to use them. And, of course, if you don't care for the way Google implements Android, there's always the choice of CyanogenMod/AOSP if you don't like the idea of Firefox OS or Linux distros for mobile.
As for the no-server limitation, it all depends on what you're doing with it. If you are using bandwidth provided at no cost by Google, it's a bit inconsiderate to hog resources with a high-traffic server, making them unavailable to others. If all you're doing is running a little mail server for a handful of users, I doubt if Google could give a fuck.
Re:Don't be evil (some of the time) (Score:5, Informative)
I always pointed out on slashdot, just HOW MUCH trust was being put in Google, with how little understanding of their operation as a publicly traded company.
Oh, climb down before you hurt yourself.
We ALL know that google makes money selling your demographics in bulk and pushing ads on you.
There is no secret there. In my day job I manage google advertising for the company I work for, and we get nothing identifiable on those who click my company's ads. (Just like Google's privacy policy says).
The ads Google pushes into web pages are targeted. We all know that. If I search for Lexus dealers, Lexus ads show up on various web pages. Big deal. I can turn on ad block at any time.
There is no lack of understanding here. You made that up. We know what they do and how they do it.
I've never had any of my "private information" leaked, or sold to anyone. I've got unique searchable strings in many of my Google Docs files, emails, etc, and they don't show up on the net.
As far as this example, this so called net neutrality issue is not even what net neutrality is all about. Further, ALL broadband providers have limitations on offering services (mail, web, game, blogs) on residential connections. Comcast, Roadrunner, AT&T, all of them). There is nothing new here.
You want to provide a service, buy a business connection.
Re:Troll much? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Troll much? (Score:4, Informative)
1 Gbps? no, I pay and only get to do 6 Mbit/sec down and 758 kbit/sec up, the fastest rate available. the telecoms can upgrade their gear as they were paid billions by we the taxpayers and we the subscribers to do in the 90s, but they blew the money on a couple other interesting things.
Re:Don't be evil (some of the time) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Don't be evil (some of the time) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As someone who HASN'T (Score:5, Informative)
I believe the whole point of this article is that Google are publicly stating that they do give a **** and that they support legally blocking you from doing it.
Re:No, it is simple economics (Score:5, Informative)
"What about a linux pc running an apache/web and openarena/game servers serving personal photos to friends and family?"
Obviously, personal.
"How about a custom carpenter showing off his work for potential customers to see and a phone number to call to arrange payment and shipment?"
Obviously, commercial.
I cannot say where you draw the line, in reality a lot of it would be based on usage. They really do not care if a small time carpenter has a website, but obviously they do not want Facebook just buying 5 residential lines and running Facebook for 100 dollars a month in ISP fees. Or a ISP who just buys a single residential ISP fibre line from Google and then sell 100 half price connections.
Re:Don't be evil (some of the time) (Score:3, Informative)
What you are talking about is personal use, usually protected by firewall and credentials.
Google is talking about open web servers to the world, open file servers, etc...
It's in the agreement you have to sign to get the service.
Personal use stuff is not what they are concerned with.
Re:Don't be evil (some of the time) (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, I do; but not for ever.
At the moment most ISP's do not support IPv6, and this is in part because (despite the press releases and tech specs released by Juniper and Cisco) the support for IPv6 in ISP core routers is buggy, experimental and feature-limited.
It turns out "Supports IPv6" doesn't mean "Expect full feature transparency between IPv4 and IPv6". In fact, on some routers it means "... but turning on IPv6 may cause random lockups"
In fact, it's so bad that you will often find ISP's who do "support IPv6" have enabled it on a couple of their BGP border routers, then drop it into an MPLS instance and tunnel it over their IPv4 core network, then expose it to customers on their LNS.
So yes, any ISP that has (a) taken the initiative, and (b) managed to get IPv6 working well enough to offer it to customers, is in the minority and should get commercial recognition for their effort.
Re:Don't be evil (some of the time) (Score:5, Informative)
That's irrelevant, what they are selling is bandwidth and there should be no restrictions on how you can use the bandwidth that you've paid for. What they want to do is charge you more because you want to use the same bandwidth for a different purpose.