8 ms·

IMHO, this headline & article is sensational and almost a straw-man argument. I'm not sure anyone should expect to be able to run a substantial business off the

by smtddr 13y ago

IMHO, this headline & article is sensational and almost a straw-man argument. I'm not sure anyone should expect to be able to run a substantial business off their home internet connection without buying a business-class connection - nor does this decision by Google somehow imply they've "flip-flopped" on net-neutrality. I run a little game-server from my RaspberryPi at home. Technically, I'm not allowed to do this. While my Comcast IP is supposedly dynamic, it only changes once every 18 months or so. But I really think the law is there for people who go overboard sending terabytes-per-hour with some crazy successful business. At its peak, my site only gets only about 5,000+ hits per month or so(because it reports real-time data and people hit refresh all the time). Like Comcast, even if Google says no, just go ahead and do it anyway. They'll probably not bother you unless you're rolling your own Netflix-clone or something, in which case you really should upgrade to business-class or get on those cloud providers.

Scaevolus 13y ago
Enforcement is currently aimed at users consuming the most bandwidth, but I'd rather not have to hope that the selective enforcement doesn't apply to my rule violations. "Everyone's a felon" and "everyone's violating the contract" is a terrible state of affairs.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  This is what retroactive restrictions based on "generally accepted understanding of what things means" feels like: Its "Unlimited Internet!", oh wait, if you are in the top 1% of bandwidth users we reserve the right to throttle you. Oh wait, we really don't want you to use more than 5GB a month. Ok fine, if you use more than 2GB we'll start throttling you and at 5GB your network connection will become unusable.
perlgeek 13y ago
> I'm not sure anyone should expect to be able to run a substantial business off their home internet connection without buying a business-class connection Right, because you usually don't have SLAs for connection. But apart from that -- why ever not?
- criley2 13y ago
  Exactly. Business traffic is business traffic. There is absolutely no reason that a "consumer" grade fat fiber pipe is unusable for non-critical business stuff, except for one reason: "We can charge businesses more". But hey, I guess little shops that want to provide their customers with wi-fi and batch send some financial information at the end of the day need Big Expensive Solutions (TM) to accomplish it...
- k3n 13y ago
  As a former pawn in the ISP game, there's a lot of reasons, though most of them are either directly or indirectly related to SLA's. The implied notion is that residential customers aren't going to lose money while their connection is down, whereas most business customers lose money every minute that their connection is down. When I was in residential support, you don't know how many times I heard, "Well you better get this fixed ASAP! My business depends on it." I'd have to remind them that if they expected business-class service -- including 24/7/365 phone/email tech support, over-nighted equipment replacements, etc. -- then that required a business-class contract. If you pay the pithy rate for consumer-grade service, you get <surprise!> consumer-level support, and there is a world of difference between residential and business support capabilities. It's also not a secret that the business support techs are usually a rung or two above those in residential support, and so what may take that junior-level tech a few hours to fix, would take the senior-level tech in business support a few minutes (and more often, to resolve it correctly). This is not only due to the nature of the issues being more challenging for business support, but because it's the ISP's prerogative to keep their clients online. Unlike most residential customers, business will more likely have access to more options for service; whereas AT&T, Comcast, TWC, etc. can piss all over their residential customers, it usually doesn't matter because the customer literally has no other alternative. On the other hand, businesses are often courted by ISP's, and competitive offers are always available. This is compounded by the fact that business-class service more specific in its offerings; you don't just pick a "basic" or "turbo" package, you often have 10x as many choices which take into account latency, burst rate, symmetrical upload/download, etc. Another perk of business-class at some ISP's is a direct communication line to the NOC. Not specifically by phone (still have to go through support for that usually), but at least where I worked, the NOC sent out emails to our business customers for every planned outage (in advance, right before execution, and upon completion) with details of the work, as well as for unplanned outages (which usually detailed the nature and impact of the outage). At times, alerts were sent out when a large-scale malware, DDoS, etc. was present. You know, things that as a business, your own networking/sysadmin staff need to know to do their job effectively.
md224 13y ago
The real question here is how important it is for home users to have the ability to run servers without signing up for a business-class account. Google wants to create an equivalence between two groups: 1) People who want to run a server at home 2) Businesses The debate here should be about if that equivalence is dangerous and why. Perhaps it would be better to avoid the connotations of the word "business" and just view this as Google saying "if you want to run a server, you have to pay more for a premium account." Do people think this is reasonable?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > The real question here is how important it is for home users to have the ability to run servers without signing up for a business-class account. That may be a real question, but I that its not the real question; equally real is the question of whether what Google did is permissible under the language of the Open Internet Report and Order, since that's a governing regulation (and, on top of that, one for which Google recently and actively lobbied.) And, related to that, whether the expectation that Google will obey the law governing where they can and cannot restrict customers when offering a service is reasonable.
- Guvante 13y ago
  Google doesn't want to create that equivalence. The problem is the definition of business in the US is so broad as to be unusable for this kind of thing. For instance Google is fine with you using your connection to VPN to work, but you are technically an agent of your business when you do that. Thus outright disallowing Businesses is a no-go, since they can't filter you beforehand they have to get you to filter yourself. One way would be to ensure that the business version is so much better than the consumer version that businesses switch themselves. Unfortunately if you have 99.9% uptime and 1 Gbps total bandwidth, who isn't okay with that?
  - k3n 13y ago
    What if the support options for residential was strictly email, and only answered M-F 9-5 (not including holidays) with a response time of 24-48 hrs, but for business support you get 24/7/365 phone & email support with a response time of 1 hour? Because that is going to be the story, more or less. The amount of time you can stand to be without service is basically the crux of the decision; if you just run a gaming server or host your mom's cooking website, being down a day or three won't really matter, but if you (or your clients) depend on your site -- say, you have an online reservation system for a hotel -- then even an hour is going to cost you money, and I know from personal experience that if it's down for a day or more, the client is probably going to drop you unless you pay them off in a big way (free month of service, etc.).
Groxx 13y ago
>people who go overboard sending terabytes-per-hour with some crazy successful business Which is why they probably limit 'excessive use', and / or have hard GB caps in place, which basically every ISP does. If you paid for, say, 20GB of up/down traffic, and you can run your server within that, why should they be able to say you can't do that, just because it's a "server"? If you had uploaded 20GB to e.g. Dropbox, they aren't complaining. If you have Google's fiber, even if they say it's unlimited, they still have the ability to restrict your up/down speed (I'm assuming, given the legal support of all the past "unlimited X!" that sometimes gets throttled to extinction). Why don't they just limit it if you're being excessive, regardless of the purpose? Or offer extended GB/TB packages and put hard limits somewhere?
- grahamburger 13y ago
  Or better yet, just deprioritize the heavy users' traffic. That way you don't even get slowed down unless the queues start to fill up somewhere on the network.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  > If you had uploaded 20GB to e.g. Dropbox, they aren't complaining. It's even more ridiculous than that! If you sync 20GB to dropbox, that's a client. If you sync 20GB with bittorrent sync, that's a server. Same data, same purpose, same network load. But one gets banned. Also, I have to wonder if someone at google has heard of a thing called an X11 server...
  - ars 13y ago
    You are defining server that way. Google is not. So you are arguing about something that doesn't even exist.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      How does google define server, then? 1. Does P2P count? 2. What if I'm downloading a creative commons movie and seed it to a ratio of 15? 3. What if I'm seeding a hobby video podcast I make at a constant 300mbps? 4. What if I use opera unite instead of bittorrent? 5. What if I switch to nginx? 6. What if I make a living off that video podcast? 7. What if I was only sending it to my family instead of the world?
redblacktree 13y ago
Doesn't that make you a felon, ala Aaron Schwartz?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jrochkind1 13y ago
> But I really think the law is there for people who go overboard sending terabytes-per-hour with some crazy successful business. What law? You mean the term in Google's contract with it's subscribers that prevents servers? That's not a law. If they wanted to limit servers to a certain bandwidth, or to say you can't use their connection for a business that charges money -- why wouldn't they just put that in their contract instead? It's their contract to write how they like. What they liked was to prohibit all 'servers', rather than what you suggest they meant to do. Maybe their lawyers made a mistake, you should let them know.
md224 13y ago
Would Tor nodes count as servers under Google's guidelines? Could Google theoretically prohibit someone from running a Tor node if they're not a business-class account?
GigabyteCoin 13y ago
Don't offer unlimted 1Gbps up/down if you're not willing to make good on that promise. Companies shouldn't be allowed to choose how much is too much when the usage in question is within the scope of an agreed upon contract.
- nemothekid 13y ago
  Allowing potentially every user to utilize 75% of 1 Gbps up/down service 24/7 is crazy. I don't imagine Google is doing this to line their pockets - the infrastructure was created with certain assumptions in mind and when someone is using it outside of the parameters, it becomes a headache for the engineers. Here's an analogy - Amazon's AWS service. When you have noisy neighbors - people using AWS's service in a way Amazon did not expect, it degrades performance for everyone else. Now while for Amazon it makes sense to increase server capacity, noisy "consumer internet" should upgrade to a business class connection. And again, it is within the scope of agreed contract, its in the article. I don't think its insane to offer a certain guarantees of a service (1 Gbps up/down) within limitations (you won't be using 75% of it 24/7).
  - JoshTriplett 13y ago
    > And again, it is within the scope of agreed contract, its in the article. I don't think its insane to offer a certain guarantees of a service (1 Gbps up/down) within limitations (you won't be using 75% of it 24/7). Then specify the limits up front, rather than promising a gigabit connection. Metered Internet access is potentially reasonable, unless the limitations are arbitrary, undocumented, and capricious.
    - nemothekid 13y ago
      >Metered Internet access is potentially reasonable Except when its not, because everyone will bitch & moan about rocking the boat. When Comcast added the 250GB monthly limit, there was a large vocal minority that made sure that that restriction never left trail.
      - 13y ago
dragonwriter 13y ago
> IMHO, this headline & article is sensational and almost a straw-man argument. No, its really not. Google was a very strong proponent of the freedom of users do use connections as a dumb piple that was written into the FCC Open Internet rules, and is now acting in a way directly opposed to that in favor of a ISPs power to blanket ban all server use (and, on top of that, based on their apparent behavior, also the power to adopt such a blanket ban and then enforce it selectively to only actually prohibit server use that the ISP has other reasons to oppose besides the mere fact of server use, which then serves as an end run around the transparency provisions of the open internet order as well as the neutrality provisions, since the real substantive rules are not disclosed.) This is a fairly breathtaking flip-flop, and the headline is quite accurate. > Like Comcast, even if Google says no, just go ahead and do it anyway. They'll probably not bother you unless you're rolling your own Netflix-clone or something, in which case you really should upgrade to business-class or get on those cloud providers Avoiding "they'll probably not bother you" guesswork is exactly the point of the transparency provisions of the Open Internet report and order, and the specific ISP-based prohibitions of lawful applications that had occurred that the FCC cited as motivating the neutrality provisions included IPSs banning specific server software (notably, P2P filesharing software), so its pretty clear that blanket server bans are within the scope of the problems the neutrality provisions are designed to address.
- hatsix 13y ago
  It really is sensational and straw-man. I've never heard anybody suggest that the VERY common clause that prohibits servers is in some way related to net neutrality. (for instance, in the 18 pages that Wikipedia uses to describe net neutrality, they NEVER reference the user's ability to run servers) This just seems to be some sort of flame-bait article by someone who rants hourly about how "Don't Be Evil" is a bunch of crap. Sure, be upset that Google won't let you run your company web server on a personal Google fiber account. Fine, complain about ToS... but don't pretend that this is about Net Neutrality or Google Flip-Flopping. And, to be clear, the entire Comcast-banning-software wasn't an issue... it was Comcast disrupting and discriminating against the packets that caused the issue...
  - 13y ago
kalleboo 13y ago
And when I had 100/100 MBps in Sweden, my ISP had no mention of what you're allowed to use your connection for outside of outright abuse (DoS flooding, hacking). And I was even paying student rates in the range of $15/mo. I ended up running an internet radio station and a image host CDN slave out of my apartment, uploading 3-4 TB/mo. They never cared. Their network was solid, and they were profitable. So few people will do this (especially since with the lack of an SLA) that they can easily afford it.
lstroud 13y ago
It boils down to what they are selling? Does the product ad say, 1 Gb bandwidth for $XX when use of bandwidth doesn't exceed 20%? Generally, these sort of exceptions are not made clear at the time of purchase. Frankly, if they are selling bits or bandwidth it shouldn't matter the type of account. The type of account should only impact customer service. The water company analogy should apply.
Tloewald 13y ago
Good grief. This is about stuff as simple as being able to deprioritize packets from rival businesses — want to make Vonage suck compared to your bundled phone service or Amazon video suck compared to Netflix? Net Neutrality prevents this and the guys who are against it are The Usual Suspects. There's nothing in Net Neutrality to stop vendors from capping bandwidth, only from cherry-picking packets. In this specific case, virtually anything — including say the bittorrent client WoW uses to distribute patches or GoToMyPC — qualifies as a server.
etler 13y ago
Why can't they just limit part of the service to make it impractical to run a large server on it? Decrease the upload bandwidth, or limit the number of simultaneous connections you can have. Those would all be service limitations instead of discriminating on use.

by smtddr 13y ago

Scaevolus 13y ago

Enforcement is currently aimed at users consuming the most bandwidth, but I'd rather not have to hope that the selective enforcement doesn't apply to my rule violations. "Everyone's a felon" and "everyone's violating the contract" is a terrible state of affairs.

ChuckMcM 13y ago
This is what retroactive restrictions based on "generally accepted understanding of what things means" feels like: Its "Unlimited Internet!", oh wait, if you are in the top 1% of bandwidth users we reserve the right to throttle you. Oh wait, we really don't want you to use more than 5GB a month. Ok fine, if you use more than 2GB we'll start throttling you and at 5GB your network connection will become unusable.

perlgeek 13y ago

> I'm not sure anyone should expect to be able to run a substantial business off their home internet connection without buying a business-class connection Right, because you usually don't have SLAs for connection. But apart from that -- why ever not?

criley2 13y ago
Exactly. Business traffic is business traffic. There is absolutely no reason that a "consumer" grade fat fiber pipe is unusable for non-critical business stuff, except for one reason: "We can charge businesses more". But hey, I guess little shops that want to provide their customers with wi-fi and batch send some financial information at the end of the day need Big Expensive Solutions (TM) to accomplish it...
k3n 13y ago
As a former pawn in the ISP game, there's a lot of reasons, though most of them are either directly or indirectly related to SLA's. The implied notion is that residential customers aren't going to lose money while their connection is down, whereas most business customers lose money every minute that their connection is down. When I was in residential support, you don't know how many times I heard, "Well you better get this fixed ASAP! My business depends on it." I'd have to remind them that if they expected business-class service -- including 24/7/365 phone/email tech support, over-nighted equipment replacements, etc. -- then that required a business-class contract. If you pay the pithy rate for consumer-grade service, you get <surprise!> consumer-level support, and there is a world of difference between residential and business support capabilities. It's also not a secret that the business support techs are usually a rung or two above those in residential support, and so what may take that junior-level tech a few hours to fix, would take the senior-level tech in business support a few minutes (and more often, to resolve it correctly). This is not only due to the nature of the issues being more challenging for business support, but because it's the ISP's prerogative to keep their clients online. Unlike most residential customers, business will more likely have access to more options for service; whereas AT&T, Comcast, TWC, etc. can piss all over their residential customers, it usually doesn't matter because the customer literally has no other alternative. On the other hand, businesses are often courted by ISP's, and competitive offers are always available. This is compounded by the fact that business-class service more specific in its offerings; you don't just pick a "basic" or "turbo" package, you often have 10x as many choices which take into account latency, burst rate, symmetrical upload/download, etc. Another perk of business-class at some ISP's is a direct communication line to the NOC. Not specifically by phone (still have to go through support for that usually), but at least where I worked, the NOC sent out emails to our business customers for every planned outage (in advance, right before execution, and upon completion) with details of the work, as well as for unplanned outages (which usually detailed the nature and impact of the outage). At times, alerts were sent out when a large-scale malware, DDoS, etc. was present. You know, things that as a business, your own networking/sysadmin staff need to know to do their job effectively.

md224 13y ago

The real question here is how important it is for home users to have the ability to run servers without signing up for a business-class account. Google wants to create an equivalence between two groups: 1) People who want to run a server at home 2) Businesses The debate here should be about if that equivalence is dangerous and why. Perhaps it would be better to avoid the connotations of the word "business" and just view this as Google saying "if you want to run a server, you have to pay more for a premium account." Do people think this is reasonable?

dragonwriter 13y ago
> The real question here is how important it is for home users to have the ability to run servers without signing up for a business-class account. That may be a real question, but I that its not the real question; equally real is the question of whether what Google did is permissible under the language of the Open Internet Report and Order, since that's a governing regulation (and, on top of that, one for which Google recently and actively lobbied.) And, related to that, whether the expectation that Google will obey the law governing where they can and cannot restrict customers when offering a service is reasonable.
Guvante 13y ago
Google doesn't want to create that equivalence. The problem is the definition of business in the US is so broad as to be unusable for this kind of thing. For instance Google is fine with you using your connection to VPN to work, but you are technically an agent of your business when you do that. Thus outright disallowing Businesses is a no-go, since they can't filter you beforehand they have to get you to filter yourself. One way would be to ensure that the business version is so much better than the consumer version that businesses switch themselves. Unfortunately if you have 99.9% uptime and 1 Gbps total bandwidth, who isn't okay with that?
- k3n 13y ago
  What if the support options for residential was strictly email, and only answered M-F 9-5 (not including holidays) with a response time of 24-48 hrs, but for business support you get 24/7/365 phone & email support with a response time of 1 hour? Because that is going to be the story, more or less. The amount of time you can stand to be without service is basically the crux of the decision; if you just run a gaming server or host your mom's cooking website, being down a day or three won't really matter, but if you (or your clients) depend on your site -- say, you have an online reservation system for a hotel -- then even an hour is going to cost you money, and I know from personal experience that if it's down for a day or more, the client is probably going to drop you unless you pay them off in a big way (free month of service, etc.).

Groxx 13y ago

>people who go overboard sending terabytes-per-hour with some crazy successful business Which is why they probably limit 'excessive use', and / or have hard GB caps in place, which basically every ISP does. If you paid for, say, 20GB of up/down traffic, and you can run your server within that, why should they be able to say you can't do that, just because it's a "server"? If you had uploaded 20GB to e.g. Dropbox, they aren't complaining. If you have Google's fiber, even if they say it's unlimited, they still have the ability to restrict your up/down speed (I'm assuming, given the legal support of all the past "unlimited X!" that sometimes gets throttled to extinction). Why don't they just limit it if you're being excessive, regardless of the purpose? Or offer extended GB/TB packages and put hard limits somewhere?

grahamburger 13y ago
Or better yet, just deprioritize the heavy users' traffic. That way you don't even get slowed down unless the queues start to fill up somewhere on the network.
Dylan16807 13y ago
> If you had uploaded 20GB to e.g. Dropbox, they aren't complaining. It's even more ridiculous than that! If you sync 20GB to dropbox, that's a client. If you sync 20GB with bittorrent sync, that's a server. Same data, same purpose, same network load. But one gets banned. Also, I have to wonder if someone at google has heard of a thing called an X11 server...
- ars 13y ago
  You are defining server that way. Google is not. So you are arguing about something that doesn't even exist.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    How does google define server, then? 1. Does P2P count? 2. What if I'm downloading a creative commons movie and seed it to a ratio of 15? 3. What if I'm seeding a hobby video podcast I make at a constant 300mbps? 4. What if I use opera unite instead of bittorrent? 5. What if I switch to nginx? 6. What if I make a living off that video podcast? 7. What if I was only sending it to my family instead of the world?

redblacktree 13y ago

Doesn't that make you a felon, ala Aaron Schwartz?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jrochkind1 13y ago

> But I really think the law is there for people who go overboard sending terabytes-per-hour with some crazy successful business. What law? You mean the term in Google's contract with it's subscribers that prevents servers? That's not a law. If they wanted to limit servers to a certain bandwidth, or to say you can't use their connection for a business that charges money -- why wouldn't they just put that in their contract instead? It's their contract to write how they like. What they liked was to prohibit all 'servers', rather than what you suggest they meant to do. Maybe their lawyers made a mistake, you should let them know.

md224 13y ago

Would Tor nodes count as servers under Google's guidelines? Could Google theoretically prohibit someone from running a Tor node if they're not a business-class account?

GigabyteCoin 13y ago

Don't offer unlimted 1Gbps up/down if you're not willing to make good on that promise. Companies shouldn't be allowed to choose how much is too much when the usage in question is within the scope of an agreed upon contract.

nemothekid 13y ago
Allowing potentially every user to utilize 75% of 1 Gbps up/down service 24/7 is crazy. I don't imagine Google is doing this to line their pockets - the infrastructure was created with certain assumptions in mind and when someone is using it outside of the parameters, it becomes a headache for the engineers. Here's an analogy - Amazon's AWS service. When you have noisy neighbors - people using AWS's service in a way Amazon did not expect, it degrades performance for everyone else. Now while for Amazon it makes sense to increase server capacity, noisy "consumer internet" should upgrade to a business class connection. And again, it is within the scope of agreed contract, its in the article. I don't think its insane to offer a certain guarantees of a service (1 Gbps up/down) within limitations (you won't be using 75% of it 24/7).
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  > And again, it is within the scope of agreed contract, its in the article. I don't think its insane to offer a certain guarantees of a service (1 Gbps up/down) within limitations (you won't be using 75% of it 24/7). Then specify the limits up front, rather than promising a gigabit connection. Metered Internet access is potentially reasonable, unless the limitations are arbitrary, undocumented, and capricious.
  - nemothekid 13y ago
    >Metered Internet access is potentially reasonable Except when its not, because everyone will bitch & moan about rocking the boat. When Comcast added the 250GB monthly limit, there was a large vocal minority that made sure that that restriction never left trail.
    - 13y ago

dragonwriter 13y ago

> IMHO, this headline & article is sensational and almost a straw-man argument. No, its really not. Google was a very strong proponent of the freedom of users do use connections as a dumb piple that was written into the FCC Open Internet rules, and is now acting in a way directly opposed to that in favor of a ISPs power to blanket ban all server use (and, on top of that, based on their apparent behavior, also the power to adopt such a blanket ban and then enforce it selectively to only actually prohibit server use that the ISP has other reasons to oppose besides the mere fact of server use, which then serves as an end run around the transparency provisions of the open internet order as well as the neutrality provisions, since the real substantive rules are not disclosed.) This is a fairly breathtaking flip-flop, and the headline is quite accurate. > Like Comcast, even if Google says no, just go ahead and do it anyway. They'll probably not bother you unless you're rolling your own Netflix-clone or something, in which case you really should upgrade to business-class or get on those cloud providers Avoiding "they'll probably not bother you" guesswork is exactly the point of the transparency provisions of the Open Internet report and order, and the specific ISP-based prohibitions of lawful applications that had occurred that the FCC cited as motivating the neutrality provisions included IPSs banning specific server software (notably, P2P filesharing software), so its pretty clear that blanket server bans are within the scope of the problems the neutrality provisions are designed to address.

hatsix 13y ago
It really is sensational and straw-man. I've never heard anybody suggest that the VERY common clause that prohibits servers is in some way related to net neutrality. (for instance, in the 18 pages that Wikipedia uses to describe net neutrality, they NEVER reference the user's ability to run servers) This just seems to be some sort of flame-bait article by someone who rants hourly about how "Don't Be Evil" is a bunch of crap. Sure, be upset that Google won't let you run your company web server on a personal Google fiber account. Fine, complain about ToS... but don't pretend that this is about Net Neutrality or Google Flip-Flopping. And, to be clear, the entire Comcast-banning-software wasn't an issue... it was Comcast disrupting and discriminating against the packets that caused the issue...
- 13y ago

kalleboo 13y ago

And when I had 100/100 MBps in Sweden, my ISP had no mention of what you're allowed to use your connection for outside of outright abuse (DoS flooding, hacking). And I was even paying student rates in the range of $15/mo. I ended up running an internet radio station and a image host CDN slave out of my apartment, uploading 3-4 TB/mo. They never cared. Their network was solid, and they were profitable. So few people will do this (especially since with the lack of an SLA) that they can easily afford it.

lstroud 13y ago

It boils down to what they are selling? Does the product ad say, 1 Gb bandwidth for $XX when use of bandwidth doesn't exceed 20%? Generally, these sort of exceptions are not made clear at the time of purchase. Frankly, if they are selling bits or bandwidth it shouldn't matter the type of account. The type of account should only impact customer service. The water company analogy should apply.

Tloewald 13y ago

Good grief. This is about stuff as simple as being able to deprioritize packets from rival businesses — want to make Vonage suck compared to your bundled phone service or Amazon video suck compared to Netflix? Net Neutrality prevents this and the guys who are against it are The Usual Suspects. There's nothing in Net Neutrality to stop vendors from capping bandwidth, only from cherry-picking packets. In this specific case, virtually anything — including say the bittorrent client WoW uses to distribute patches or GoToMyPC — qualifies as a server.

etler 13y ago

Why can't they just limit part of the service to make it impractical to run a large server on it? Decrease the upload bandwidth, or limit the number of simultaneous connections you can have. Those would all be service limitations instead of discriminating on use.