
Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers” - sinak
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues-awful-isp-tradition-banning-servers
======
dkulchenko
I honestly don't see the problem with this. The restriction on servers is
clearly not there to prevent you from SSHing to your home computer or to run a
Minecraft server for you and your friends.

It's there to prevent abuse of your otherwise unlimited gigabit connection for
only $70/month to run a filesharing website on that saturates the connection
24/7/365\. If you want to use Google Fiber for business use, pay for their
business plan, simple as that.

EDIT: Seems a few people are missing a key detail. When you buy a personal
Google Fiber plan, you're _not_ paying for an unmetered 1Gbps
upstream/downstream fiber connection. You're paying for an unmetered 1Gbps
upstream/downstream connection _for personal use_.
([https://fiber.google.com/legal/terms.html](https://fiber.google.com/legal/terms.html)).

There are services that will sell you purely unmetered, unrestricted
bandwidth, but it won't be Google Fiber, and it won't be for only $70/month.

~~~
guelo
If you're not selling me a gigabit connection with unlimited bandwidth than
don't tell me that's what you're selling. Put in your bandwidth caps if you
need to. Just don't tell me what I can do with my bandwidth that I bought.

~~~
chrissnell
You didn't really buy 1 Gbit of unlimited-use bandwidth. You bought the right
to use up to 1 Gbit of throughput so long as you abide by their T&C/AUP in
your usage of that throughput.

This bandwidth is oversold. Of course it's oversold. 1000 Mbit of Internet
connectivity costs a lot more than you're paying Google for it, never mind the
last-mile cost of connecting your home. You can't seriously expect to run a
business on a residential connection sold at residential prices, right? Like
it or not, this has been the status-quo since the earliest days of broadband
in the late 1990s.

Now, that said, Good Guy Google would give every Google Fiber customer a GAE
instance on which to run their servers. By doing this, they move the servers
to network infrastructure that's actually designed for running servers.

~~~
trafficlight
I've been thinking a lot about starting a fiber ISP in my hometown and this is
a big issue that's come up.

I don't believe in restricting what a customer can do with their connection to
internet, but I also don't want to someone to consume more resources than they
are reasonably paying for.

In my ideal world, I want to sell a connection to the internet that is as fast
as I can reasonably deliver. I don't even want to make the distinction between
100Mbps and 1Gbps. I don't want speed to be factor. Just fast.

Is there a better way to phrase the service offering instead of 'unlimited'?

When I read this back to myself, it sounds like I want to have my cake and eat
it to. Lots of contradictions in my mind.

~~~
JoshTriplett
There are three options that make sense (though you don't necessarily want to
offer all of them).

\- X Mbps guaranteed, unmetered, do whatever you want (including servers). X
here is not oversold: you need to have enough bandwidth for everyone to use
the bandwidth you've sold them simultaneously.

\- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a
guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, X TB/month (pay more if you use
more), do whatever you want (including servers). Here, the minimum Mbps is the
non-oversold level, and the burst takes advantage of available bandwidth that
others aren't using. You need the transfer limit here to prevent a small
handful of users saturating their ports and crowding out all other users; if
they want to do that, they can pay for it.

\- Port-speed connection that may burst to that speed, optionally with a
guaranteed minimum Mbps that isn't oversold, unmetered, best-effort based on
the usage of other customers, ToS-limited to the types of activity that won't
continuously saturate all available bandwidth (e.g. no continuous torrents
beyond the minimum Mbps, no high-traffic servers). Here, you're not charging
for additional bandwidth, but you're also telling people not to run anything
that will saturate more than the amount you're guaranteeing them. Your remedy
for users violating the ToS is to limit them to only the guaranteed bandwidth,
effectively moving them to the first type of connection.

The first two options are standard with business-class Internet connections.
The third option is what consumer Internet connections normally offer. You
could offer a hybrid of the first and third options, where you can use X Mbps
continuously for anything you want, but only burst to the full port speed
intermittently.

~~~
wmf
On the second option you could replace the cap with per-customer fair queueing
to end up with a work-conserving system. It's not clear what the resulting
performance would be, though.

------
jmillikin
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6129379](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6129379)

The main point of contention appears to be that the EFF is defining "server"
as any process that opens listening sockets, while ISPs use definitions based
more on traffic patterns and uptime requirements.

Google's FAQ addresses this issue. From
[https://fiber.google.com/help/](https://fiber.google.com/help/) :

    
    
      Can I run a server from my home?
    
      Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
      use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
      video-conferencing, home security and others which may
      include server capabilities but are being used for legal
      and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged.
    
    

See also: [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/07/google...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/07/google-we-can-ban-servers-on-fiber-without-violating-net-
neutrality/)

~~~
diminoten
I said it before, and I'll say it again, but any attempt to differentiate
packets based on use rather than quantity is a violation of network
neutrality. All packets are created equally, why should _any_ ISP care why my
packets exist?

~~~
jmillikin
Network Neutrality is typically defined in terms of traffic sources, not use.
It's both expected and encouraged that ISPs will differentiate between
different types of packets based on what they contain.

For example, it would be obviously bad for Comcast to place Netflix at the
bottom of the QOS stack, but perfectly reasonable to do so with Bittorrent.

~~~
diminoten
Comcast should _not_ be maintaining a QOS stack. Period. That is a violation
of net neutrality.

~~~
jmillikin
You are using a definition of net neutrality that differs from everyone
else's. In the interest of conversational clarity, you ought to pick a
different term.

All residential ISPs sell more aggregate consumer capacity than total peering
capacity, because very few users require the full use of their connection at
all times. This permits their users' bills to be much lower, a tradeoff that
is obviously beneficial to almost everyone.

Overprovisioning absolutely _requires_ the use of QOS and throttling. If my
neighbor decides to torrent a hundred terabytes of ATLAS data, that should
(ideally) not cause any of my DNS or RTP packets to be dropped.

~~~
qu4z-2
He's using the same definition of "net neutrality" I was using...

What do you mean by it?

~~~
jmillikin
My understanding is that net neutrality is when the ISP does not
prioritize/throttle/block traffic based on sender or recipient.

This definition permits traffic shaping based on content, such as dropping
bittorrent packets to preserve dns/rtp latency on a link shared between
customers.

~~~
diminoten
Net neutrality isn't simply about sender/recipient, it's also about type of
packet. Mandated QoS is a direct violation of net neutrality.

------
josh2600
I think this is the most hypocritical position Google can take.

In terms of "knowing better" is there any company that would be in a better
position to understand the nature of servers and infrastructure?

The cognitive dissonance is astounding.

I would have no problem if they put bandwidth caps, as long as they were
articulated. I can totally understand if someone is jamming petabytes, but
those are gigabit connections. What constitutes abuse?

Is it possible that Google jumped into the ISP world without fully
understanding the magnitude of the problem? I think of ISPs as another fractal
problem, like email or calendars. From 100,000 feet away, it looks simple, but
the details of running very large networks are surprisingly complex.

To be clear, my position is that calling a service unlimited and then
throttling using intentionally obfuscating criteria is unconscionable. If
you're going to throttle me, let me know what the terms are. Pretending a
"server" is automatically a giant mainframe like device is the kind of
ignorance I expect from the DOD not Google.

------
doctoboggan
To anyone who thinks google is lying by calling this "unlimited" consider
this:

When you go to a restaurant they will serve you free water and give you free
napkins. If you asked the waitress how much water you were allowed to have she
would probably say "as much as you want". This does not mean you can connect a
hose to their water supply and start selling the water. You can not pull up
with a large truck and start unloading boxes of their napkins because you can
have "as much as you want".

There are common sense limitations on unlimited services, and I do not think
google is crossing any lines here.

~~~
parfe
Surprised none of the indignant commenters are opening a food truck in front
of every olive garden. The unlimited Soup Salad and Breadsticks could be
resold for pure profit!

That's how the real world works, isn't it?

~~~
amorphid
I actually really like this analogy :)

I'll add that anyone who expects the product "inside the box" to be exactly
what they see "on the box" is going to have a bad time.

------
betterunix
It is appalling that Google would do that, but not so surprising for other
ISPs. Verizon is a phone company; if you are a "home user" then you are
expected to be a consumer of services, just like it works with the phone.
Comcast is a cable TV company; "home users" are expected to be consumers there
also, since that is what a cable TV receiver does.

Of course those companies miss the point of the Internet. Those companies do
not really like the Internet anyway, with its neutrality and the philosophy of
"all nodes created equal."

Now, we should expect better from Google, given Google's origins...

~~~
jmillikin
The internet has never been based on a philosophy of all nodes being equal.
It's only in the past few years that such an arrangement is even technically
possible. For the vast majority of the internet's history, communicating nodes
could be assumed to be grossly unequal in both bandwidth and latency.

~~~
betterunix
The neutrality does not refer to technical limitations like bandwidth. It
refers to the capabilities of an Internet-connected computer to communicate
with other computers.

This seems obvious if you are used to the Internet, but there was no technical
reason things had to be made this way. Look at a modern cable TV system: that
is a computer network too, and if you have a digital cable receiver then you
have a computer connected to such a network. You cannot run your own cable
channel just because you have a connection. Your receiver is a different kind
of node than what is at the head end; head end nodes are allowed to transmit
video, receivers are only allowed to receive video and make on-demand requests
(and a few other things, none of which include transmitting video).

~~~
jmillikin

      > It refers to the capabilities of an Internet-connected
      > computer to communicate with other computers.
    

There is no inherent property of the internet ensuring that all nodes are
equally capable of sending or receiving packets. There are large sections of
the internet placed behind routers that enforce non-transitive forwarding
rules. Sometimes, hardware failures or software policies prevent communication
between arbitrary sets of nodes.

There is no indication that Google Fiber, or any other major ISP, is planning
to ban incoming connections. The TOS does not ban users from replying to SYN.

I will also note that phone networks are just as node-egalitarian as the
internet. In a typical phone network, any endpoint may establish a circuit to
any other connected endpoint. Saying that Verizon expects its users to be
consumers because they sell phone service is incoherent.

------
patrickg_zill
Don't look at what they "say" look at what they "do".

They operate on a shared model, with definite over-subscription built in to
their network design.

However if they allow ports 22,80,443 traffic, then really they are winking at
it - basically "use it but don't abuse it in a way that will cause us to make
more rules about it" .

------
wnevets
Its kind of silly to watch so many people trying to turn this into a major
issue.

edit: I suggest everyone just read the wiki on Net Neutrality
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Definitions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Definitions)

~~~
cracell
It is a major issue. People need to be able to play and tinker. As a
child/teenager I didn't have money to pay for servers online but I still
wanted to mess with that stuff.

My ISP didn't enforce the no-servers rule so I was able to run home servers
but you shouldn't have rules that violate net neutrality that you "choose"
when to enforce. People need to be able to tinker and figure things out
without artificial restrictions that exist purely so that they can claim to
not have bandwidth caps. It's borderline false advertisement and a violation
of net neutrality.

~~~
wnevets
This doesnt stop you from tinkering or anything of the like. Its meant to stop
a business trying to piggy back on a residential service. Just feed their FAQ

[https://fiber.google.com/help/](https://fiber.google.com/help/) : Can I run a
server from my home?

    
    
      Our Terms of Service prohibit running a server. However,
      use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
      video-conferencing, home security and others which may
      include server capabilities but are being used for legal
      and non-commercial purposes are acceptable and encouraged.

~~~
bestdayever
You expect people to read?

~~~
wnevets
Silly me.

------
csense
The solution is easy. Instead of banning a specific usage pattern, just say
that anyone who exceeds 100 GB / month [1] of usage gets their speed cut to
10% [1] for the rest of the month [2].

It's simple and obvious and I'm amazed that Google, of all companies, isn't
smart enough to figure this solution out on their own.

From the ISP's point of view, their infrastructure costs are based on the
bandwidth used, not the specific application. The only reason they care about
the latter is to price-discriminate between businesses and consumers.

[1] The numbers and units are obviously parameters that a specific ISP needs
to tweak based on their actual costs.

[2] Or more sophisticated variations on this theme, like using an hourly
basis: e.g. if your usage during the last 720 hours (30 days) exceeds 100 GB,
then throttle for a few hours until some high-usage hours fall off the end of
the 720-hour window. Or better yet, weight previous usage exponentially.

------
andrewvc
Home users don't really want unmetered connections, the costs would be too
high, and it'd be wasteful.

~~~
diminoten
What makes you think the costs would be too high? What technical reason is
there for that statement?

~~~
ddunkin
As soon as you get infected or bring a kid back from college and let them
torrent like crazy, the bandwidth overage costs get high, fast. I tried this
for years with our customers, we're going unlimited because we're tired of
arguing with people who can't comprehend this model.

~~~
diminoten
What are the actual technical reasons, however?

~~~
ddunkin
Technical reasons? There are none. This is customer/sales driven, normal (non-
technical and the majority) customers don't want to bother with technical
bandwidth/transfer non-sense.

------
aspensmonster
Earlier HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6129379](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6129379)

What a _shock_ that Google is now flip-flopping on network neutrality.

------
ddunkin
I'm not impressed, this is 'residential' service we are talking about here.

If you want to host services, get static IP blocks, run BGP, pay more for a
business-grade service.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
The issue here is the(perhaps intentionally) vague definition of "server".
What about the folks in the middle ground? Who want to run a home VPN, who
want to use their NAS remotely, or who want to run their own "cloud"? The ISPs
could define the term more verbosely and lock out people actually abusing home
connections while simultaneously _not_ screwing the people legitimately
looking to use their home connection for anything but web browsing.

~~~
tomkarlo
The more precisely the server provider defines it, the more they are giving
folks a playbook for skirting the rules, and as a result potentially
encouraging more overall abuse. You're _assuming_ they'll be "screwing people
legitimately... " but as long as the customer's total data consumption isn't
excessive, an ISP has no reason to come down on them - the ISP should be happy
to just collect their fee.

------
eksith
Just to be clear, most of these ISPs have a "business" or "pro" version for an
extra (exorbitant) fee with marginally higher up/down bandwidth that let you
run a server.

I've yet to come across a decent provider package that lets me host a server
with at least 99% uptime. FiOS seems to go down like clockwork in the mid
mornings for the past 2 months or so and that kept me from even attempting to
run a server from home. I mean, what's the point?

Besides that pretty much every provider has their variation on server bans. I
think Optimum just says "servers" are prohibited whereas Verizon goes into a
bit more detail "Web, FTP, SMTP" etc...

~~~
aspensmonster
In Austin, the business offerings are actually slower than the consumer
offerings. They run over the exact same cables too, in TWC's case at least.
Your (fewer) packets just get priority over others in the event of congestion.
I utilized TWCBC for a year. 100 dollar installation and 150 dollars a month
for 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up, and one static IP. I could have spent an extra
100 dollars (edit: _monthly_ ) and upgraded to 20 Mbps down, and a whopping 2
Mbps up. Now, I get 21 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up on ATT Uverse (an apples to
oranges technical comparison, I am aware, though TWC's consumer cable
offerings were similar) for a third of that price, and can push and pull far
more packets than TWCBC ever was willing to deliver.

This really has nothing to do with "network management," the go to catch-all
that every ISP --including Google now, it seems-- trots out every time network
neutrality comes up. This has everything to do with ensuring that old-school
business models are propped up that expect captive, consuming audiences,
rather than adhering to the decentralized model of independent nodes on the
network.

~~~
eksith
That's terrible! I'd have thought that Austin would have had far more options
than that considering how many tech companies and startups there are. I guess
we're all sorely lacking _real_ competition and it seems Google isn't there
either.

~~~
vonmoltke
I live in a fairly dense suburban section of Dallas a mere 3 miles from TI's
headquarters, yet I cannot get DSL at my house[1] because I am too far from a
CO. When we moved in (2008), the only only internet options were Time-Warner
cable or a T1 line, which is what I went for. U-verse only rolled out about
two years ago. Granted its not Austin, but what you say should apply here as
well.

I would also like to point out that, back in 2008, TWC refused to sell me
business-class service because I wasn't a business. Even if I formed one, the
only business-class service they would run to our house was their basic
"Teleworker" service.

[1] This may not be completely true, as AT&T claims they can provide it. I
don't know how they can when others cannot, but their website may only be
claiming that based on straight-line distance from the CO rather than loop
length.

------
tuke
One of the most interesting claims in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital
(1996) was that bandwidth would be the same into and out of the home, and that
home servers would be ubiquitous. I think his key example was the idea of live
video exchange between grandparents and grandchildren.

Another Negropontean idea was that bits are bits. The notion of somehow
partitioning server-like entities on the basis of their behavior doesn't fit,
he argued, the architecture of the Internet.

------
aaronchriscohen
am I missing something or is this not just typical TOS boilerplate to give
Google power to ban bandwidth hogs? Are there any Google Fiber customers who
have been banned for setting up servers that did not also involve moving
tremendous amounts of data?

------
johngalt
Astonished by the people _complaining_ about 1Gbps connections for $70/month
just because they can't run it line rate 24/7\. It's unreal how quickly humans
adjust to getting what they want. The very next minute it's unfair and they
want more.

I must be getting old, because I want to scream 'I remember when internet
access was charged by the minute! and only at 14.4kbps!'

~~~
Dylan16807
This has nothing to do with how much data you send. A server using a kilobit
per minute is just as banned as any other kind of server.

------
knodi
If google is saying that I can't use my internet connection which i bought
though them to sell to or provide internet to large group of other people then
that makes sense. A building owner just guy buy google fiber service and
charge all their tenants to use his connection which he bought through google
fiber.

At the end of the day google fiber is business.

------
EpicEng
Sounds to me like their marketing just need to be more clear. I don't think it
is reasonable to say things like "personal use can easily saturate a 1gb
connection" like I see in the comments here.

C'mon, if you're saturating a 1gb connection for a large percentage of the
day, you're doing something other than what most would consider "personal
use". I think they need to define "personal use", i.e., "typical household
use, browsing the internet, watching the occasional streaming video",
certainly not "downloading huge torrents at all times and monitoring the
cameras at your small business."

I would kill for access to G Fiber.

------
jessaustin
I'll be more concerned when we have examples of actually I-know-it-when-I-see-
it _unfair_ "server" bans, rather than purely hypothetical risks. (We
certainly have had examples of unfairness from other providers, like Comcast.)
In these modern times there are many options available for shared hosting,
IaaS, colocation, etc. at all price points and service levels. Of course if
you're just operating your own low-traffic mail server Google doesn't care.
They probably don't even really care if you operate an appropriately-throttled
Tor node. If you're saturating the link, however, someone will notice.

------
bifrost
As someone who has in the past run a small-ish ISP for home/business users,
people who want to run servers at home usually create a fair amount of support
overhead, so its no surprise that this is a common issue. Most ISP's don't
care what you do as long as you're not causing a problem.

This only exists because of bad users, don't blame the ISPs for your lousy
neighbors :)

------
lucb1e
This is why the Dutch ISP XS4ALL rocks. Full IPv6 connection since like 2
years, opened port 25 outgoing, and they're totally cool about running any
kind of server at home. On top of that you get a free shell server and
thousands of wifi access points from them. Yeah it costs five more bucks a
month, but I say it's totally worth it.

------
jamespo
I wonder if some of the furore is due to people thinking they could start a
nice hosting business and saturate their google fiber connection? It's not as
if no alternatives exist (or that it is even realistic to think you could max
out the bandwidth with servers for that price).

------
matthiasb
I feel that allowing Google Fiber customers to connect their own servers to
the network would go against Google own interests. Google business relies on
hosting their customers application and data.

------
jpd750
Google is nothing but garbage anymore. Reminding me of Microsoft

------
gnu_fan2
information creation should be forbidden = no servers allowed

------
killermonkeys
EFF continues awful tradition of confusing personal digital liberty advocacy
with lame complaining about not getting things that cost money for "free".

------
wilyk
There's a whole lot of hate going around for a company offering Gigabit
Internet to residential subscribers for $80/month. Whether it's oversubscribed
with caps on utilization or not, it's offering 1024 MB DL speed for $80/month.

And you all are COMPLAINING about that in a "you're not the boss of me" kind
of way, ranting about how QoS limitations violates "net neutrality", etc etc.
Seriously?

~~~
pessimizer
>Seriously?

This is not an argument, and neither is "Oh, please!" (for future reference.)

