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Disclaimer: Google employee here, though nothing to do with Fiber. I don't really like the no "server" policy, mainly because it's impossible to define what a

Disclaimer: Google employee here, though nothing to do with Fiber. I don't really like the no "server" policy, mainly because it's impossible to define what a server is, but I understand it from a business perspective. If a business likely to use a significant portion of their upstream bandwidth, it's reasonable to charge more than a consumer who doesn't. At the same time you want to be nice to power users who aren't running a business, but who use more upstream than average and might recommend the service to others. Personally, I think this is all a consequence of not having metered billing. It would be more fair if your bill was a function of max bandwidth, actual data transferred, and service levels (support, QoS, etc.), though I would pay more than most of my neighbors. The headline and net-neutrality tie in are just wrong though. This has nothing to do with net neutrality, it's a service level / market segmentation issue.

Zikes 13y ago
If net neutrality is not the practice of the ISP being neutral to the data being sent over its network, then what is it? If they want to make it an issue of maximum bandwidth, so be it. Give us a cap and draw the line, but ambiguity is not going to do anyone any good.
- lightcatcher 13y ago
  When I hear people talk about net neutrality, I think of ISPs inspecting and/or rate-limiting (or blocking) certain types of packets. I don't think that a simple declaration of rules (ie no servers) is as serious of a problem as silently blocking/throttling certain types of traffic.
  - Zikes 13y ago
    An incoming request to port 80 vs an outgoing request to port 80 is a certain type of traffic, if you ask me.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > When I hear people talk about net neutrality, I think of ISPs inspecting and/or rate-limiting (or blocking) certain types of packets. That's one way of violating net neutrality, but that's not the boundary of net neutrality. > I don't think that a simple declaration of rules (ie no servers) is as serious of a problem as silently blocking/throttling certain types of traffic. Well, no, silently blocking is both a neutrality problem and a transparency problem, the latter of which compounds the former by obscuring the nature and scope of it from the customer. Of course, Google's policy (which states a blanket "no servers" but is, per the statements of Google employees that some servers are okay, doesn't really mean that) also seems to have transparency problems on top of its neutrality problems.
- spankalee 13y ago
  People hate caps, but I agree it's probably a better solution. Personally, to make a clear and less potentially discriminatory rule that encourages business to buy business-class service, I'd probably go with burstable upstream speeds, uncapped at the lower speed with a cap only on the fast speed.
  - Zikes 13y ago
    Even without a cap or any such rules whatsoever, there's plenty of room for a business-class service. It could have better uptime guarantees, redundancy, 24/7 support, and more.
wmf 13y ago
In some people's minds network neutrality means no price discrimination (one might cynically notice that people who make this argument stand to benefit from it personally even if the market as a whole wouldn't).
ChuckMcM 13y ago
"I don't really like the no "server" policy, mainly because it's impossible to define what a server is, but I understand it from a business perspective." But that is the rub isn't it, its easy to understand why, from a business perspective, ComCast (nee Xfinity) might think it has the right to limit bandwidth to YouTube while providing full bandwidth to its Video-on-demand service right? And yet that is exactly the sort of behavior Google argued against in ite neutrality plea arguing that it is about the customer's perspective that is important here, and if the customer wants to get their video from YouTube, their ISP should be prevented from interfering with that, especially if they have a conflict of interest going on. And guess what, Google has a fecal-load of conflict of interest when you start putting a server on your Google Fiber, that is perhaps an "AppEngine" account they didn't get, or a better email experience than Gmail, or really awesome photo sharing. All things that Google would not get any revenue (advertising or otherwise) if they let that happen. I expect that we'll eventually get to packet access to the Internet is a city service, like sewer and garbage, and all of this will be moot. But until this is a really poor move on Google's part and entirely hypocritical to their earlier stance. So in that regard I feel the headline is spot on.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  Slightly different propositions. YouTube and other providers already buy bandwidth by capacity, say X Gbps for $$/month. When ComCast decides that traffic going through their network has to be taxed, they are limiting their users' bandwidth, which is also already paid for. If that's not working out financially, they should raise prices, not devise a way to extract money from content producers while holding consumers hostage. Ditto on internet access as a public service, it's about time we fix that.
- jmillikin 13y ago
  > And guess what, Google has a fecal-load of conflict of > interest when you start putting a server on your Google > Fiber, that is perhaps an "AppEngine" account they > didn't get, or a better email experience than Gmail, > or really awesome photo sharing. All things that Google > would not get any revenue (advertising or otherwise) if > they let that happen. I don't think Google is worried about consumers paying $70 a month to switch from Gmail to a home-hosted server. Anyone capable or interested in running their own server is going to rent a $10/month VPS, not try to kludge something together in their closet.
cabalamat 13y ago
> If a business likely to use a significant portion of their upstream bandwidth, it's reasonable to charge more than a consumer who doesn't. Fine, then have a policy based on bandwidth used. I doubt that many people would object to this, so long as the policy was clear, and didn't discriminate based on the content of the bits transmitted.
Filligree 13y ago
I imagine it's not meant to stop people from SSHing to a screen session running irssi, which is something I use my home server for a lot. Other than being a backup server, that's actually the main reason I have it. So, what is the actual rule here?
- jebblue 13y ago
  As long as they don't stop a simple SSH server then I'd say it's ok.
thomaslangston 13y ago
The terms of service 'no server' clause is a net neutrality issue created as a poor response to a market segmentation issue. Paraphrased from Wikipedia: Net neutrality is the principle that an ISP should not discriminate by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication. Google is discriminating by a least a few of these criteria. If there is a market segmentation problem, metering and support contracts as you suggested would be appropriate. But by choosing to instead discriminate by these other factors, the article has accurately described this as a net neutrality issue.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> This has nothing to do with net neutrality, it's a service level / market segmentation issue. Its a service level market segmentation issue that directly relates to the neutrality provisions in the Open Internet order (for which Google actively lobbied), and which is only a news item because Google is the target of a complaint for violating the neutrality provisions of that Order. So, yes, its a service level / market segmentation issue, but its also undeniably and unquestionably a net neutrality issue, and its only a potential compliance issue because of the net neutrality aspects.

Zikes 13y ago

If net neutrality is not the practice of the ISP being neutral to the data being sent over its network, then what is it? If they want to make it an issue of maximum bandwidth, so be it. Give us a cap and draw the line, but ambiguity is not going to do anyone any good.

lightcatcher 13y ago
When I hear people talk about net neutrality, I think of ISPs inspecting and/or rate-limiting (or blocking) certain types of packets. I don't think that a simple declaration of rules (ie no servers) is as serious of a problem as silently blocking/throttling certain types of traffic.
- Zikes 13y ago
  An incoming request to port 80 vs an outgoing request to port 80 is a certain type of traffic, if you ask me.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > When I hear people talk about net neutrality, I think of ISPs inspecting and/or rate-limiting (or blocking) certain types of packets. That's one way of violating net neutrality, but that's not the boundary of net neutrality. > I don't think that a simple declaration of rules (ie no servers) is as serious of a problem as silently blocking/throttling certain types of traffic. Well, no, silently blocking is both a neutrality problem and a transparency problem, the latter of which compounds the former by obscuring the nature and scope of it from the customer. Of course, Google's policy (which states a blanket "no servers" but is, per the statements of Google employees that some servers are okay, doesn't really mean that) also seems to have transparency problems on top of its neutrality problems.
spankalee 13y ago
People hate caps, but I agree it's probably a better solution. Personally, to make a clear and less potentially discriminatory rule that encourages business to buy business-class service, I'd probably go with burstable upstream speeds, uncapped at the lower speed with a cap only on the fast speed.
- Zikes 13y ago
  Even without a cap or any such rules whatsoever, there's plenty of room for a business-class service. It could have better uptime guarantees, redundancy, 24/7 support, and more.

wmf 13y ago

In some people's minds network neutrality means no price discrimination (one might cynically notice that people who make this argument stand to benefit from it personally even if the market as a whole wouldn't).

ChuckMcM 13y ago

"I don't really like the no "server" policy, mainly because it's impossible to define what a server is, but I understand it from a business perspective." But that is the rub isn't it, its easy to understand why, from a business perspective, ComCast (nee Xfinity) might think it has the right to limit bandwidth to YouTube while providing full bandwidth to its Video-on-demand service right? And yet that is exactly the sort of behavior Google argued against in ite neutrality plea arguing that it is about the customer's perspective that is important here, and if the customer wants to get their video from YouTube, their ISP should be prevented from interfering with that, especially if they have a conflict of interest going on. And guess what, Google has a fecal-load of conflict of interest when you start putting a server on your Google Fiber, that is perhaps an "AppEngine" account they didn't get, or a better email experience than Gmail, or really awesome photo sharing. All things that Google would not get any revenue (advertising or otherwise) if they let that happen. I expect that we'll eventually get to packet access to the Internet is a city service, like sewer and garbage, and all of this will be moot. But until this is a really poor move on Google's part and entirely hypocritical to their earlier stance. So in that regard I feel the headline is spot on.

ricardobeat 13y ago
Slightly different propositions. YouTube and other providers already buy bandwidth by capacity, say X Gbps for $$/month. When ComCast decides that traffic going through their network has to be taxed, they are limiting their users' bandwidth, which is also already paid for. If that's not working out financially, they should raise prices, not devise a way to extract money from content producers while holding consumers hostage. Ditto on internet access as a public service, it's about time we fix that.
jmillikin 13y ago
> And guess what, Google has a fecal-load of conflict of > interest when you start putting a server on your Google > Fiber, that is perhaps an "AppEngine" account they > didn't get, or a better email experience than Gmail, > or really awesome photo sharing. All things that Google > would not get any revenue (advertising or otherwise) if > they let that happen. I don't think Google is worried about consumers paying $70 a month to switch from Gmail to a home-hosted server. Anyone capable or interested in running their own server is going to rent a $10/month VPS, not try to kludge something together in their closet.

cabalamat 13y ago

> If a business likely to use a significant portion of their upstream bandwidth, it's reasonable to charge more than a consumer who doesn't. Fine, then have a policy based on bandwidth used. I doubt that many people would object to this, so long as the policy was clear, and didn't discriminate based on the content of the bits transmitted.

Filligree 13y ago

I imagine it's not meant to stop people from SSHing to a screen session running irssi, which is something I use my home server for a lot. Other than being a backup server, that's actually the main reason I have it. So, what is the actual rule here?

jebblue 13y ago
As long as they don't stop a simple SSH server then I'd say it's ok.

thomaslangston 13y ago

The terms of service 'no server' clause is a net neutrality issue created as a poor response to a market segmentation issue. Paraphrased from Wikipedia: Net neutrality is the principle that an ISP should not discriminate by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication. Google is discriminating by a least a few of these criteria. If there is a market segmentation problem, metering and support contracts as you suggested would be appropriate. But by choosing to instead discriminate by these other factors, the article has accurately described this as a net neutrality issue.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> This has nothing to do with net neutrality, it's a service level / market segmentation issue. Its a service level market segmentation issue that directly relates to the neutrality provisions in the Open Internet order (for which Google actively lobbied), and which is only a news item because Google is the target of a complaint for violating the neutrality provisions of that Order. So, yes, its a service level / market segmentation issue, but its also undeniably and unquestionably a net neutrality issue, and its only a potential compliance issue because of the net neutrality aspects.