Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use
googleprotest.com

Most ISP's give home users a significant discount on their service, in exchange for agreeing to certain assumptions about their use.

This is done because most home users could never afford internet, if they had to pay for full price.

For example, in this area, a dedicated 20x20mb connection to the internet costs about $500USD per month (Metro Ethernet). You can do almost anything you want with this connection, since your paying for the full cost. Run servers, re-sell it to others at markup, host hundreds of websites on it, anything that's legal to do in the US, you can do with this connection.

However, most people can't afford $500/month at their house, and most people would like to have faster download speeds than 20mb. These folks might instead buy a Comcast residential plan that offers 50mb down, 10mb up, for roughly $80 (which is what that plan costs here).

$80/month is a lot cheaper than $500/month. The reason it's cheaper is because you agree to use it very lightly (no servers, no commercial use, no re-selling, keep total bandwidth use under 250-500GB, ect).

What some people try to do, is 'cheat' that system. They try to buy a 'home' connection, and run their business-level services on it. ISP's crack down on that, because it's not fair to the others whose service that person is disrupting.

However, some home users have legitimate home uses that appear to be cheats in the system. Running a Minecraft server for your friends is a 'valid' home use, but it sometimes conflicts with an ISP's rule (which might make an assumption that all servers are 'business class only' uses).

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Sometimes it gets trickier -- where there's competition, anyone can buy high speed internet. (Urbanized Cities are usually ok here, lots of people sell Fiber lines / Metro Ethernet / Microwave / ect).

But at your house, there's usually zero competition by law. A provider like Comcast might be the only option you have for high speed internet (perhaps they bought exclusive franchise rights to your city, or perhaps your state or local level government has created a law preventing new providers from competing in your area (this isn't just theoretical, both of those things commonly happen in the USA)

At this point, your usually stuck. The provider was given monopoly status, but isn't being controlled by the regulations needed to ensure it doesn't abuse it's monopoly status. What can you do, besides raise a lot of complaints about that monopoly provider's rules.

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TL/DR : Home users never pay for most of the speeds they get. Therefore, those speeds have to be shared among lots of people. ISP's use rules to make sure everyone shares nicely. By default, those rules are overly harsh. Good ISP's properly loosen the restrictions to allow obviously-good home uses.

Without a proper reverse DNS record and an IP address not from a residential pool, most properly configured servers will reject emails immediately (in order to combat spam).