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I don't see any evidence that Google applied a misinformation policy here. It could be that they simply don't want to pay for the bandwidth to serve video with

I don't see any evidence that Google applied a misinformation policy here. It could be that they simply don't want to pay for the bandwidth to serve video without any ads in it. It is a big file and a lot of people want it. That can get super expensive. I don't know how big this file is, but let's say it's a 4GB DVD image. That ties up 1Gbps for 32 seconds, which means that with a 1Gbps link to your server, you can serve it to less than 3000 users a day. Even if you're getting budget residential ISP prices for your transfer, you're talking 1 cent per 10 copies of the video. At AWS prices, you're talking 36 cents for every copy of the video downloaded. This sort of thing is why you either peer with an ISP at 10Gbps or more, charge money for file hosting, or use a p2p file sharing application. Until I see some evidence that this is misinformation censorship (for example, Google removing a private file with a transcript of the video), I'm going to assume this is just limiting the impact on other users from a free user with a popular huge file. As HN always says, if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer.

tibyat 6y ago
just no. no to all of that. it's a trailer. it was taken down from youtube, facebook, twitter, tiktok, and now google drive. for misinformation. name an instance of google removing a google drive file for bandwidth cost.
Eduard 6y ago
On the other hand, they could support freedom of speech by not limiting access. They do block access, therefore suppressing freedom of speech. Arguing with "they're just saving resources" is ridiculous, especially when considering Google's wealth.
- jrockway 6y ago
  You have moved the goalposts dramatically. What started as "random files in Google Drive are being scanned for conspiracy theories and deleted", which would be incredibly worrying, is now "Google should give me tens of thousands of dollars worth of free stuff", which is not all that worrying.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    How is it 'free stuff' when many people pay for Google Drive?
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      You pay for some things not everything. It's like when you go to the gym you have access to everything but if you take all the dumbbells and assemble them in the squat rack and start curling 5 lbs, you're gonna get kicked out.
      - Natsu 6y ago
        Can you point me to where it says resource limits were ever an issue here, though? That seems... questionable.
- mike503 6y ago
  Also, freedom of speech is not guaranteed on a privately owned platform... not sure why anyone expects that.
  - chroem- 6y ago
    Windows 10 is a free subscription, and users don't necessarily own a license of their operating system. Under this precedent, what is to stop Microsoft from deleting problematic files off of users' computers? After all, it's a privately owned platform.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      It's not clear that the file itself was removed, only that sharing it was disabled. So no file was deleted. You own the storage space you use when using windows on your personal device.
    - jrockway 6y ago
      Windows 10 routinely deletes problematic files from peoples computers; it's called "Windows Defender". Most users are happy to let Microsoft delete malware. The reason that propaganda videos aren't detected as malware because none of these companies give a damn about what you're using your computer or your private storage for. It is a ton of extra work for them to run some censorship side business to specifically annoy conspiracy theorists. The reason that YouTube deletes propaganda videos is because nobody will advertise on them. They cost money to store and serve to viewers, but will never generate revenue. Some are so bad that they drive advertisers away from other videos. All this "censorship" is at the behest of advertisers, or fear of backlash from advertisers. The thing with YouTube is that its greatest power is its greatest weakness. They let anyone in the world serve 4k or 8k videos to an infinite number of users. They find advertisers for your videos and automatically run their ads on your videos, so that you can get cash money from producing them. And, there is a recommendation engine so that viewers can discover your video and channel. With those advantages, come disadvantages -- the service as a whole is called YouTube, and so a bad video on your channel reflects poorly on other channels and the service as a whole. So they have guidelines to protect their success, at the cost of not making all the advantages available to you. That is why there are "guidelines". I am sure if you buy a Google Cloud account and pay for the transfer and storage of your content, and find your own advertisers to fund it, you can host as many conspiracy theory videos as you want and nobody will stop you. But I think you'll find that you make negative money on this proposition. (Also, I personally paid $200 for Windows 10, so I'm not sure how people are getting it for free.)
- SllX 6y ago
  One way businesses get wealthy is by not letting people act like parasites on what are ultimately finite resources no matter how vast they may seem. Google makes a business case for making a certain percentage of their resources available without charge to users of their other services, but that isn’t a promise to provide unlimited storage and bandwidth. Now we don’t really know fully what happened here. Certainly you could make guesses and if you’re cynical enough, make a convincing case that what they engaged in here was censorship because of the content. If you check your worst impulses and apply Occam’s Razor though, you’ll probably think that the removal or at least access limitation was an economic decision, one that Google engages in all the time when users abuse the terms of their shared file hosting, and one which every service provider of shared file hosting you or I have ever heard of has had to make at some point if they’ve ever seen any real use.
herostratus101 6y ago
Does Google Drive not charge users based on data transfer? With S3 this would not be an issue, but either the uploader or the downloader (with "requester pays" buckets) would end up covering the cost.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  If you have Google Drive, you are either on a free or paid personal account, or a Google Business account which also includes Drive. I believe there is an Acceptable Use Policy for both the free and paid versions of personal and business Drive, but I am only a user of both and not an expert. I routinely use a lot of data and bandwidth on my paid Google business Drive to no ill effect, and I only pay my monthly fee, no additional/excess/egress charges. I probably upload 5-10 TB a month or so and download probably a few TB. From a later comment on this post: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505?visit_id=637257739027213395-534836487&rd=1 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505?visit_id=63725... 'Abuse program policies and enforcement 'The content policies listed below play an important role in maintaining a positive experience for everyone using Google products. We need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide these services, and we ask that everyone abide by the policies below to help us achieve this goal. 'These policies apply to content within Google Drive. When applying these policies, we may make exceptions based on artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific considerations, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content. Be sure to check back from time to time, as these policies may change. Please also refer to Google's Terms of Service for more information.'
- jpab 6y ago
  Google Drive is a consumer product (+), not really the same use case or target market as S3. Consumers probably don't want to deal with variable charges on their card depending on how many people they shared a file with. Certainly I (as a consumer) wouldn't want to deal with a complicated price model like that. (+) And business productivity suite product, but I think the same mostly applies there.
splonk 6y ago
I'm aware of at least one community that shares copyrighted videos on Google Drive, and I'm sure there's more. There's at least two ways videos get taken down. 1. If there's too much burst traffic (like when a new popular episode is released), you can see that the video exists but GDrive won't let you stream it in the browser. I can't recall if you can still download the file. There may still exist a workaround where if you copy the file to your own GDrive (and your own quota), that copy will be available to you. In any case, usually the file becomes available again when traffic dies down. 2. Accounts sometimes get removed, or at least their shared files are no longer available publicly. I assume this is from getting too many copyright strikes against them. I would assume if the video was popular, at least #1 would have happened here. It's unclear to me from the article if anything beyond that happened. That said, it wouldn't terribly surprise me if there was some process somewhere that matches up videos banned from Youtube and restricts their availability on GDrive.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bitL 6y ago
If it's HEVC it would be pretty small. Also, I doubt many people would be interested in that content. Storage-space wise, it's all internally de-duplicated so identical blocks across multiple files of their users are likely stored only once + number of replicas-times. If it were frequently downloaded, CDN/caches would have made it cost-efficient as well.
- pfisch 6y ago
  > Also, I doubt many people would be interested in that content. I don't think that is true at all.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Videos on Google drive are transcoded to tens of different formats for viewing, depending on the devices hardware decoders and bandwidth available.
phyzome 6y ago
« I don't know how big this file is, but let's say it's a 4GB DVD image. » It says they were sharing a trailer, so I'd suggest all your numbers should be scaled down by a factor of at least 100.
ohyeshedid 6y ago
I agree. There is some transfer limit on free GDrive accounts, though I'm unsure of what it is. I've seen it mentioned by archive teams. What I find really interesting about all of this is that it highlights that YT can, when it's deemed necessary, actively police content. Something long thought to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, in regards to copyrighted content.
- thejynxed 6y ago
  2 TB per day up/down is the limit I hit backing up some raw image files from my DSLR. This might vary based on your overall usage as well (they more than likely penalize frequent uploaders of large files in some fashion).

tibyat 6y ago

just no. no to all of that. it's a trailer. it was taken down from youtube, facebook, twitter, tiktok, and now google drive. for misinformation. name an instance of google removing a google drive file for bandwidth cost.

Eduard 6y ago

On the other hand, they could support freedom of speech by not limiting access. They do block access, therefore suppressing freedom of speech. Arguing with "they're just saving resources" is ridiculous, especially when considering Google's wealth.

jrockway 6y ago
You have moved the goalposts dramatically. What started as "random files in Google Drive are being scanned for conspiracy theories and deleted", which would be incredibly worrying, is now "Google should give me tens of thousands of dollars worth of free stuff", which is not all that worrying.
- Natsu 6y ago
  How is it 'free stuff' when many people pay for Google Drive?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    You pay for some things not everything. It's like when you go to the gym you have access to everything but if you take all the dumbbells and assemble them in the squat rack and start curling 5 lbs, you're gonna get kicked out.
    - Natsu 6y ago
      Can you point me to where it says resource limits were ever an issue here, though? That seems... questionable.
mike503 6y ago
Also, freedom of speech is not guaranteed on a privately owned platform... not sure why anyone expects that.
- chroem- 6y ago
  Windows 10 is a free subscription, and users don't necessarily own a license of their operating system. Under this precedent, what is to stop Microsoft from deleting problematic files off of users' computers? After all, it's a privately owned platform.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    It's not clear that the file itself was removed, only that sharing it was disabled. So no file was deleted. You own the storage space you use when using windows on your personal device.
  - jrockway 6y ago
    Windows 10 routinely deletes problematic files from peoples computers; it's called "Windows Defender". Most users are happy to let Microsoft delete malware. The reason that propaganda videos aren't detected as malware because none of these companies give a damn about what you're using your computer or your private storage for. It is a ton of extra work for them to run some censorship side business to specifically annoy conspiracy theorists. The reason that YouTube deletes propaganda videos is because nobody will advertise on them. They cost money to store and serve to viewers, but will never generate revenue. Some are so bad that they drive advertisers away from other videos. All this "censorship" is at the behest of advertisers, or fear of backlash from advertisers. The thing with YouTube is that its greatest power is its greatest weakness. They let anyone in the world serve 4k or 8k videos to an infinite number of users. They find advertisers for your videos and automatically run their ads on your videos, so that you can get cash money from producing them. And, there is a recommendation engine so that viewers can discover your video and channel. With those advantages, come disadvantages -- the service as a whole is called YouTube, and so a bad video on your channel reflects poorly on other channels and the service as a whole. So they have guidelines to protect their success, at the cost of not making all the advantages available to you. That is why there are "guidelines". I am sure if you buy a Google Cloud account and pay for the transfer and storage of your content, and find your own advertisers to fund it, you can host as many conspiracy theory videos as you want and nobody will stop you. But I think you'll find that you make negative money on this proposition. (Also, I personally paid $200 for Windows 10, so I'm not sure how people are getting it for free.)
SllX 6y ago
One way businesses get wealthy is by not letting people act like parasites on what are ultimately finite resources no matter how vast they may seem. Google makes a business case for making a certain percentage of their resources available without charge to users of their other services, but that isn’t a promise to provide unlimited storage and bandwidth. Now we don’t really know fully what happened here. Certainly you could make guesses and if you’re cynical enough, make a convincing case that what they engaged in here was censorship because of the content. If you check your worst impulses and apply Occam’s Razor though, you’ll probably think that the removal or at least access limitation was an economic decision, one that Google engages in all the time when users abuse the terms of their shared file hosting, and one which every service provider of shared file hosting you or I have ever heard of has had to make at some point if they’ve ever seen any real use.

herostratus101 6y ago

Does Google Drive not charge users based on data transfer? With S3 this would not be an issue, but either the uploader or the downloader (with "requester pays" buckets) would end up covering the cost.

aspenmayer 6y ago
If you have Google Drive, you are either on a free or paid personal account, or a Google Business account which also includes Drive. I believe there is an Acceptable Use Policy for both the free and paid versions of personal and business Drive, but I am only a user of both and not an expert. I routinely use a lot of data and bandwidth on my paid Google business Drive to no ill effect, and I only pay my monthly fee, no additional/excess/egress charges. I probably upload 5-10 TB a month or so and download probably a few TB. From a later comment on this post: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505?visit_id=637257739027213395-534836487&rd=1 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505?visit_id=63725... 'Abuse program policies and enforcement 'The content policies listed below play an important role in maintaining a positive experience for everyone using Google products. We need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide these services, and we ask that everyone abide by the policies below to help us achieve this goal. 'These policies apply to content within Google Drive. When applying these policies, we may make exceptions based on artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific considerations, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content. Be sure to check back from time to time, as these policies may change. Please also refer to Google's Terms of Service for more information.'
jpab 6y ago
Google Drive is a consumer product (+), not really the same use case or target market as S3. Consumers probably don't want to deal with variable charges on their card depending on how many people they shared a file with. Certainly I (as a consumer) wouldn't want to deal with a complicated price model like that. (+) And business productivity suite product, but I think the same mostly applies there.

splonk 6y ago

I'm aware of at least one community that shares copyrighted videos on Google Drive, and I'm sure there's more. There's at least two ways videos get taken down. 1. If there's too much burst traffic (like when a new popular episode is released), you can see that the video exists but GDrive won't let you stream it in the browser. I can't recall if you can still download the file. There may still exist a workaround where if you copy the file to your own GDrive (and your own quota), that copy will be available to you. In any case, usually the file becomes available again when traffic dies down. 2. Accounts sometimes get removed, or at least their shared files are no longer available publicly. I assume this is from getting too many copyright strikes against them. I would assume if the video was popular, at least #1 would have happened here. It's unclear to me from the article if anything beyond that happened. That said, it wouldn't terribly surprise me if there was some process somewhere that matches up videos banned from Youtube and restricts their availability on GDrive.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bitL 6y ago

If it's HEVC it would be pretty small. Also, I doubt many people would be interested in that content. Storage-space wise, it's all internally de-duplicated so identical blocks across multiple files of their users are likely stored only once + number of replicas-times. If it were frequently downloaded, CDN/caches would have made it cost-efficient as well.

pfisch 6y ago
> Also, I doubt many people would be interested in that content. I don't think that is true at all.
londons_explore 6y ago
Videos on Google drive are transcoded to tens of different formats for viewing, depending on the devices hardware decoders and bandwidth available.

phyzome 6y ago

« I don't know how big this file is, but let's say it's a 4GB DVD image. » It says they were sharing a trailer, so I'd suggest all your numbers should be scaled down by a factor of at least 100.

ohyeshedid 6y ago

I agree. There is some transfer limit on free GDrive accounts, though I'm unsure of what it is. I've seen it mentioned by archive teams. What I find really interesting about all of this is that it highlights that YT can, when it's deemed necessary, actively police content. Something long thought to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, in regards to copyrighted content.

thejynxed 6y ago
2 TB per day up/down is the limit I hit backing up some raw image files from my DSLR. This might vary based on your overall usage as well (they more than likely penalize frequent uploaders of large files in some fashion).