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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, @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.