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from the non-soluble-fiber-is-good-for-digestion dept.
Fluffeh writes:
"Google has officially invited 34 cities in nine metro areas to become the next batch of the Google Fiber rollout.
Google said it 'genuinely would like to build in all of these cities,' but that the complexities of deploying networks may not allow it. 'During this process, we will work with each city to map out in detail what it would look like to build a new fiber-optic network there,' Google said. 'The most important part of this teamwork will be identifying what obstacles might pop up during network construction — and then working together to find the smoothest path around those obstacles. Some might be easy, some might take some creative thinking or a few months to iron out, and in some cases there might be such local complexities that we decide it's not the right time to build Google Fiber there.'"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:49AM
Be sure to read what you will be forbidden [google.com]. /. on the base of being threated as "audience" (rather than contributor) - isn't taking Google fiber a bit similar [theguardian.com] with going back on /.?
I mean, I assume you did move over from
(I might be wrong in my assumption. If I am, please don't take it as an insult, but explain)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by akinliat on Thursday February 20 2014, @01:51AM
In a word, no. And I say this as someone who owns a hosting business, and would love nothing more than to move out of the (expensive) datacenter and into nice, cheap Google Fiber-powered digs. But, as someone who makes a living managing bandwidth, I can understand why they might not want to underwrite my business, especially as they're not throttling or otherwise limiting bandwidth based on usage. As for the rest of the AUP, it looks a lot like mine (no spam, no viruses or bots, etc).
It might be good to mention here the difference between a "no-server" policy and a "no-commercial-server" policy. They're perfectly willing to let you host your personal blog, or host an online game for you and your friends. What they don't want is someone like me using their uber-cheap bandwidth to make money.
Fair enough.
As far as being a contributor -- well, I never did feel like I was a contributor to my current ISP, or even an audience. I always sort of thought I was a customer. A customer-is-always-right customer, maybe, but still a customer. I really can't see any parallel to the /. Beta debacle. At /., we provided most, if not all, of the value to the site, and so felt we had a stake in it, whereas Google is providing a service, and a damn good one at that.
Google's not taking away anything from me -- my servers are in a datacenter because there's no way you can run a hosting business over a 768Kbit DSL uplink. In fact, they're giving something I've never had before -- a choice of providers. I have my current ISP (Frontier), because Verizon sold me to them like cattle. I could go to Time Warner, but I've had cable from them for years, and I know I won't be treated any better there. They've both also been sponsoring bills at the state legislature to ban municpal broadband (which several local cities have implemented).
As far as I'm concerned, if the only thing I get out of this is the chance to thumb my nose at the whole crooked lot of them, then I'll be more than happy.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday February 20 2014, @02:02AM
Why not? If they'd want to prevent "reselling your bandwidth", I'd have no qualms. But why would they want to prevent you to make money by using their transport?
Car analogy: to my mind, it's like a road builder that want to prevent people using their roads to make money by transporting goods the road builder did contribute nothing to them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by akinliat on Thursday February 20 2014, @03:00AM
A more precise analogy might be a road builder not allowing tractor-trailer trucks on his private road. And even on our public roads, we make trucks pay extra, based on weight, or ban them altogether if they weigh too much. Why? Because roads aren't free, and big trucks put a lot of wear on any road.
Bottom line, I don't see why Google should be obligated to provide business accounts just because they're willing to provide residential accounts, and the two are not at all the same.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dmc on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:47AM
No, a much more precise analogy would be a road builder not allowing people to drive to their employer in their sedans because unlike a trip to the grocery story, they are profiting by going to work. Or, an even more precise analogy would be selective enforcement, allowing people to drive to work in their sedans, because the private road owner would get laughed out of town for trying to preclude people driving their sedan to work, but selectively enforcing against pizza delivery drivers who are profiting from their sedan deliveries to other households because they want to get a 10% cut of the pizza delivery driver's profits. And if there is someone making 10 times the amount of money driven per sedan/mile on the road because they are making more profit-efficient use of the same sedan-mile wear and tear on the road, the road builder wanting 10 times as much (because that would be the same 10% tax), or perhaps even 20 times as much because they know the sedan-driving independent businessman is so successful they can afford it, and have no other road to choose from. Or if they do have precisely one or two other roads to choose from, they find that magically and coincidentally, all 3 private road owners are charging the same 20% tax for such highly profit-efficient businesses.
I mean, if you want a more precise analogy.
There is a difference between tiers of service that a majority of businesses need (but not *all* businesses) and businesses that can still get by with the same lowest tier of service. In fact, if you look at a section 1 sherman antitrust violation criteria as I've mentioned 2 or 3 other places in this article's comments, you'll see that it is simply not legal in the U.S. to make (1)agreements that (2)unreasonably restrain (3)interstate commerce. If I can use a commercial server at my residence with no more uptime or bandwidth or customer support requirements than my neighbor using Skype and Ebay to profit with interstate digital traffic between my server and clients, that is just plain AFAICT against the law in the U.S.
(Score: 1) by c0lo on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:37AM
It's not like an absolute either/or. I could understand a statement akin: "No loads over 4 tonnes/axle allowed", but there's quite a distance from banning trailer tractors to saying "Private cars allowed, but you are banned to use the same family car as a taxi".
I never said google should be obligated to provide business accounts, I only wondered why would they want to ban blanket-ban commercial use on residential accounts? It's technically possible, it does incur extra responsibility/cost from google as long as there's no excessive traffic (a situation that can be dealt with/worded specifically in ToS), so... what's the point?
Look... as an example... say you'd be a telecommuter: technically, using your residential connection for work would be a breach to ToS. Running a small programming business from home and run your own git repo with https access... breach. Provide paid-for support/consultations for open-source projects and run demo setups of some servers... breach of ToS.
Are the above likely to create "road tear" into google's road? Mate, I'm doing all the above on a 20 Mbps connection, with a 50Gb capped traffic/month - never managed to consume more than 65% of my quota
(Score: 1) by akinliat on Thursday February 20 2014, @03:32PM
Except that both you and dmc are outliers. Most people who run servers aren't commercial software developers who make their source available via git (hey, wait a minute ...) or able to run a new hosting paradigm that can be done with only 768Kbit upstream (see dmc's post). It's people like me, or worse, who are the problem, because we're, well, common. There are a lot of folks like me. If you don't believe me, pop over to WebHosting Talk [webhostingtalk.com] sometime. It's as busy as the (sigh) pre-Beta /. And we'll suck down bandwidth like a two-dollar whore.
I'm not saying that I'm happy about Google's choice here (neither are some folks at Google), but I don't think it's either arbitrary or unreasonable. They've identified a potential problem (excessive bandwidth use by folks like me) and formulated a policy to deal with it. Is it the least restrictive policy possible? Well no ... but it's not crazy either.
Since dmc mentioned antitrust, there's also one other factor that may be playing into this -- I don't think Google really wants to start competing with the datacenter industry.
Just think, datacenter bandwidth currently runs anywhere from $1-$250/Mbit. The low end prices some of the bandwidth into the cabinet costs, and they also cut other corners. Google would be offering bandwidth at $0.07/Mbit (not counting the free service). Google already has a huge influence on web traffic, and with Android, they also have a strong presence at the network endpoint. Now they're providing network access to a whole 'nother set of endpoints. Getting a foothold on the content sources (servers) could be awfully sketchy from an antitrust viewpoint.
BTW, I think telecommuting would be allowed -- as long as you weren't running a server from your house.
(Score: 2) by dmc on Monday February 24 2014, @05:57PM
It's not crazy- it's calculated. Google wants as much control as possible. People who might be able to succeed comercially utilizing low bandwidth servers hosted at residences are a threat to Google's bottom $$ line. Sure, they may be outliers, but so were Page and Brin when they were starting out. Being able to make overly broad restrictions in the ferengi print, and then selectively enforce, or worse yet- cripple the ability of innovators to get investment capital for great ideas because of the murky legality of the ferengi print is cold-blooded calculation on their part. You are right, there is nothing crazy about it. Just criminal, since it satisfies the three criteria of a section 1 Sherman Antitrust violation.
The very, very simple honest solution is for GoogleFiber and other ISPs to stop the *fraudulent* advertising claims about bandwidth, and actually charge reasonably based on bandwidth used. (fixed costs, plus variable costs for the bandwidth). This always scared people because they thought "ooh, now my netflix usage will be more expensive". Hopefully the fallout of the demise of Net Neutrality and the extra money that Netflix is now paying to Comcast, and it's no doubt ultimate eventual being passed onto consumers will make people realize that that argument against reasonable data-usage charging was a bad argument.
I'm not looking to peg bandwidth 24/7. There is _a lot that can be done_ with low bandwidth, as long as you are free (in the Net Neutrality way that I argued and which US Navy Information Warfare Officer Dave Schroeder agreed with) to do so.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by dmc on Thursday February 20 2014, @02:10AM
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In a word, no.
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You are entitled to your opinion. And I'll be happy to elaborate on my counter-opinion.
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And I say this as someone who owns a hosting business, and would love nothing more than to move out of the (expensive) datacenter and into nice, cheap Google Fiber-powered digs. But, as someone who makes a living managing bandwidth, I can understand why they might not want to underwrite my business,
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I don't understand how being allowed to run a commercial server, using the same bandwidth as my neighbors non-commercial server, can be considered having Google "underwrite your business". Yes, I know some of your immediate counterarguments already, I'll get to those.
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especially as they're not throttling or otherwise limiting bandwidth based on usage.
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But they effectively are, in precisely one, important way. They are saying that, for hypothetical example, if there are 2 customers of "internet service", call them A and B, have servers with precisely the same bandwidth requirements, they will block B if B is making a profit from that bandwidth, but they will not block A so long as A makes no profit from that bandwidth.
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As for the rest of the AUP, it looks a lot like mine (no spam, no viruses or bots, etc).
It might be good to mention here the difference between a "no-server" policy and a "no-commercial-server" policy. They're perfectly willing to let you host your personal blog, or host an online game for you and your friends.
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They were *only* willing to go this far, within 48 hours of pictures of small children holding protest signs in Utah appeared on the internet. But that is water under the bridge, accepted.
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What they don't want is someone like me using their uber-cheap bandwidth to make money.
Fair enough.
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No, it's really not fair enough. If a grocery store sells a pound of sugar, it is *none of their business* whether or not that pound of sugar goes into the customers stomach generating no profit, or whether that pound of sugar is used to bake a creative cake that is sold for profit by the customer. Trying to get more money for the same product being sold, based _solely_ on the profit the customer is able to make from it, is not only wrong, but based on my reading today, a section 1 sherman act violation (if the cake could be sold by mail to another state).
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As far as being a contributor -- well, I never did feel like I was a contributor to my current ISP, or even an audience. I always sort of thought I was a customer.
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+1
" /. Beta debacle. At /., we provided most, if not all, of the value to the site, and so felt we had a stake in it, whereas Google is providing a service, and a damn good one at that.
A customer-is-always-right customer, maybe, but still a customer. I really can't see any parallel to the
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I would consider it good if I were free to use it without arbitrary restrictions that I considered tantamount to taxation.
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Google's not taking away anything from me -- my servers are in a datacenter because there's no way you can run a hosting business over a 768Kbit DSL uplink.
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Here is where you've struck my nerve. You are right- there is no way _you_ could run _your_ hosting business. This is because your hosting business is based around a very specific set of requirements. I am arguing that I see potential innovative hosting businesses that I could run myself that have no requirements beyond what my neighbor hosting their non-commercial blog, and using youtube and netflix are getting from their "non-commercial" internet connection.
Now- you may be right, my hosting business may fail. But I'm pretty upset if I'm not even allowed to _try_ (again, in such a way as I am using no more resources than my neighbor's non-commercial usage).
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In fact, they're giving something I've never had before -- a choice of providers. I have my current ISP (Frontier), because Verizon sold me to them like cattle. I could go to Time Warner, but I've had cable from them for years, and I know I won't be treated any better there. They've both also been sponsoring bills at the state legislature to ban municpal broadband (which several local cities have implemented).
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no disagreement with any of that. In other words, no, I'm not saying every aspect of Google is evil. There are some business practices they engage in that I find beneficial and valuable as you do. I'm merely discussing a very, very narrow subset of their business practices. I believe that is in the best spirit of our society.
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As far as I'm concerned, if the only thing I get out of this is the chance to thumb my nose at the whole crooked lot of them, then I'll be more than happy.
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Yes, it is possible that even with particular restriction I find objectionable, I may agree with you that the endeavor as a whole is a net positive thing. But this does not negate my right to pursue my specific legal (well, perhaps before the verizon ruling and until the FCC's 'retry' of NN) complaint.
(Score: 1) by charlesnw on Friday February 21 2014, @03:04PM
Um. No.
You've clearly not read the AUP/TOS. It specifically forbids servers and business services.
From the old country:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/08/13/2148245/ef f-slams-google-fiber-for-banning-servers-on-its-ne twork [slashdot.org]
http://www.tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/15/121823 0/google-fiber-partially-reverses-server-ban [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3106555&cid=41 288357 [slashdot.org]
So sorry, but you're business venture would gain zero benefit from having google fiber.