Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#121

Post by venomsnake » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 7:07 AM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #87

belorn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you are defending this kind of practices, I must ask you: Can you name a single other service or product in the world that include such restrictions , and "up to X" quantity? If I only got 50% of the actually contracted time of an rented apartment (say they wrote "up to 1 month"), I would sue. If the fine print said apartment had restrictions such as only 10 enter/exits, no commercial activities inside it like…

To be clear, I'm not defending most of it. I'm only defending 'ISP's can charge less to home users in exchange for them agreeing not to do specific things'. I'm not defending the anti-competitive nature of laws in the USA. I'm not defending overzealous use of 'home/business' seperation. And I'm not defending overselling backhaul - - - In your example, you use an rented apartment. This is a perfect example, a rented a…

600GB is not huge. It it tiny. That is half my steam library. A quarter of my backblaze backup. A crash event and I will have to wait half an year to recover my stuff.

I see your math problem. And it has some solutions:

1. Nightly speeds - this was used in my country by the ISP-s when all caps on speed were removed after 1am to 6am with QoS on 80/443 2. Non guaranteed top speeds - you allow people to go up to some speed if your network is underutilized. 3. Metered - I think that is the best approach if the pricing is right - a person cost me 20$/month just to be connected to my network (fixed costs). You ask him for 30. A terabyte moving in/out of my network costs me 2$ - you ask him for 3$. If you have 1 TB - it is 33$/month, if you want to seed a lot - be my guest. You get your margins on the traffic. And you are transparent to your customers. (yeah I know decision fatigue, but it could be solved with prepaying and just allowing access to payment sites when the prepayed traffic is over).

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#122

Post by belorn » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 7:15 AM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #87

belorn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you are defending this kind of practices, I must ask you: Can you name a single other service or product in the world that include such restrictions , and "up to X" quantity? If I only got 50% of the actually contracted time of an rented apartment (say they wrote "up to 1 month"), I would sue. If the fine print said apartment had restrictions such as only 10 enter/exits, no commercial activities inside it like…

To be clear, I'm not defending most of it. I'm only defending 'ISP's can charge less to home users in exchange for them agreeing not to do specific things'. I'm not defending the anti-competitive nature of laws in the USA. I'm not defending overzealous use of 'home/business' seperation. And I'm not defending overselling backhaul - - - In your example, you use an rented apartment. This is a perfect example, a rented a…

In each of your example, people still get the amount they buy. If you go and buy a timeshare for "up to 1 month per year", and was only allowed 15 days, you still be angry. the 1 month is in the contract, not 15 days.

Same goes for hotels. If I got kicked out of my hotel in the middle of the night because they overbooked, I would again be angry. Its my room for that night, not "up to 1 night".

As for rentaled/leased cars, as other has said in above, those don't normally comes with restrictions. Those that do, have such restrictions clearly advertised, and do not use words like unlimited mileage. They also don't restrict number of passengers or where you are allowed to drive.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#123

Post by venomsnake » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 7:19 AM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #96

betterunix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this: for $50/mo you get a guarantee of at least 1Mbps of continuous throughput (or at least a best effort at that), with no restriction on your usage beyond that? Why does it need to be black or white? Why not just dynamically adjust the throughput for "heavy users" so that nobody sees speeds below some level regardless of how others are utilizing the network? Oh, wait, these connections are so grossly ove…

For what it's worth, this is exactly how we're planning to handle shared connections. Our typical "small office" connection is advertised as "60x60 bursting on top of a dedicated T1 connection". Which comes out to most people getting around 50x50 about 85% of the time, but always having a dedicated 1.5mbps waiting for you (so it can never drop below that speed, even if every subscriber maxed out their line at the sam…

You are bringing transparency to your pricing. That is huge. What HN get annoyed about is not torrents slowing down. But torrents being slowed down for arbitrary reasons.

We know that a person's email and voice calls are more important than getting a Debian distro 4 seconds earlier. QoS shaping does not violate network neutrality the way I understand it.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#124

Post by belorn » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 7:20 AM UTC

lambda wrote: post #83

belorn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer truthful advertisement. If they must cut down on minimum transfer rates, then that’s what the advertisement should say. I have a general rule: Buy 250KB/s, and you get 100% of the bought speed. Buy 1MB/s, and get 95% of the bought speed. Buy 10MB/s, and get 80% of the bought speed. Buy 100MB/s, and get in average around 50% of the bought speed. 25 at prime time, and 90 around 4am. In the end, more expe…

Bandwidth is not like gas. It's not something that you buy, and consume it, and then go out and buy more. Instead, there's an infrastructure that need to be built. That infrastructure has a certain capacity; at any given time, only so many bits per second can be flowing over it. Now, most people don't use all of their capacity at a continuous, constant rate. Rather, their usage is quite bursty. You use a lot of bandw…

If they has such hard time to measure limits, they can always use first hop router as test base.

But lets take the look from the buyer. You see a 8MB line for $80 amount, and 10MB line for say for $100. Knowing what you pay for is the minimum requirement for informed purchase, or you end up with a lemon market.

ISP are lemon markets, and you get poor quality for more expensive price. No amount of "The infrastructure has a certain capacity" argument is going to change that.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#125

Post by jre » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 7:33 AM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #87

belorn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you are defending this kind of practices, I must ask you: Can you name a single other service or product in the world that include such restrictions , and "up to X" quantity? If I only got 50% of the actually contracted time of an rented apartment (say they wrote "up to 1 month"), I would sue. If the fine print said apartment had restrictions such as only 10 enter/exits, no commercial activities inside it like…

To be clear, I'm not defending most of it. I'm only defending 'ISP's can charge less to home users in exchange for them agreeing not to do specific things'. I'm not defending the anti-competitive nature of laws in the USA. I'm not defending overzealous use of 'home/business' seperation. And I'm not defending overselling backhaul - - - In your example, you use an rented apartment. This is a perfect example, a rented a…

Then Google just has to remove the "Up to 1GB upload & download - no data caps" part of their advertising [1]. And just put a cap on the upload they find acceptable.

[1] https://fiber.google.com/cities/kansascity/plans/

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#126

Post by wisty » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 7:42 AM UTC

lotu wrote: post #101

ape4 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a very non-busy website on my home server. Its got ads so I guess its a business. Seems petty to ban such things. (Not on Google Fiber)

Simply making money is not enough to classify your website as commercial. Also, it is likely your website costs you money when you factor in hardware, electricity, and programing time. Even if you make money your website probably still counts as hobby unless you have incorporated or are running it like you would run a business.

If there was a hard, fast rule, CC wouldn't have run a study to figure out what on earth "non commercial" actually means - http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Defining_Noncommercial

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#127

Post by InclinedPlane » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 8:08 AM UTC

officemonkey wrote: post #80

InclinedPlane wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Chances of a random person accidentally setting up an open email relay of some sort are high.

Although an open email relay would probably be some other violation of the AUP, methinks. (warning: haven't actually read AUP.)

Most likely. But it's trivial to see whether or not someone is running an SMTP server whereas it's more difficult to determine if they're running an open relay.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#128

Post by gcb0 » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 8:09 AM UTC

rsingel wrote: post #88

I still don't think this comports with the net neutrality rules, which focus on network management at a user/protocol level. Commercial/non-commercial is a business distinction -- which is exactly what net neutrality was meant to stop (e.g. Comcast throttling BitTorrent). Google Fiber shouldn't care a whit if my server is commercial or non-commercial (what does that even mean?) If my usage hurts the network, then GF…

It started as a contractual distinction. Home DSL is cheaper because it is not guaranteed to be up so you can't sue your ISP for lost business, etc...

Then the big telcos got the game, and started to elaborate among themselves how to remove service and add fees.

Someone saw the non-commercial vanilla clause, and had the great idea of using that premise to shut down inbound connections by the most insanely idiotic assumption that a listening port is a server which is foolproof indication that you have a business.

Then everyone move to the telco that didn't do that, free market at its best. for about 6 months. until all of them did. nobody had any option. and here we are today.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#129

Post by kbenson » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 8:20 AM UTC

njharman wrote: post #113

kbenson wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The friction in these situations generally comes from the hand-wavey definition of server. Google doesn't care about your website as it currently exists. They do care if it turns into boingboing, or something more commercial. Clearly defining the point at which the line is crossed hamstrings them when unforseen situations arise. Not clearly defining it allows for capricious enforcement. At either end of the spectrum…

> They do care if it turns into boingboing Why? Really why? I'm buying a certain number of bits per second. They don't need to know nor should care about the content of those bits. If they oversubscribe and sell bandwidth "bursting" up to X, but only a small fraction of X for a sustained period then they should have to advertise that clearly and not claim "X bandwidth connection". Rather than burying it in a TOS.

Because it let's them provide better service (as defined as what most people care about) to the majority of people. Better, in the context is cheaper and faster. Do you think they can provide the same speed for the same price without any limitations? I don't believe so, but feel free to make your case.

Note that by previous internet usage patterns the sustained usage of an shared upstream connection wouldn't necessarily result in less than maximum speed if provisioned correctly based on usage levels. That may be different now with more video streaming, but only in scale, not in principle.

Re: Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use

#130

Post by ilaksh » Tue, Oct 15, 2013, 9:02 AM UTC

Aren't there a ton of people who moved out there specifically to run their startups on Google Fiber? So all of them are breaking the terms supposedly.