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Google Fiber now allows servers for non-commercial use
- tnuc 13y agoTo save people from looking, it has been changed to; --- To operate servers for commercial purposes. However, personal, non-commercial use of servers that complies with this AUP is acceptable, including using virtual private networks (VPN) to access services in your home and using hardware or applications that include server capabilities for uses like multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, and home security. ---
- numbsafari 13y agoThey specifically left email off of that list. The question is: can I host servers that may compete with the commercial offerings of Google? Can I host my personal blog? Can I host my personal email server?
- q3k 13y agoYou will most likely be not able to host a personal email server from a residential ISP without an IPv4 address tunnel, anyway. Without a proper reverse DNS record and an IP address not from a residential pool, most properly configured servers will reject emails immediately (in order to combat spam).
- rhizome 13y agoI've had no trouble paying a little extra for static IPs, not to mention delegated reverse DNS, over the past 15 years.
- sliverstorm 13y agoI doubt they are trying to cut off competition to GMail. Email is blocked typically as a matter of convention by the majority of ISPs. It requires features 99.9% of customers don't care about in the slightest, and invites spam problems.
- rhizome 13y agoIt may be blocked by the ISPs that service a majority of people (i.e. cable companies), but I don't have any reason to think that it's blocked by a majority of ISPs.
- doctorohhnoes 13y agoI'm surprised to hear that. I've never had a problem with an ISP blocking SMTP.
- kodablah 13y agoInbound on port 25? I know my ISP does
- doctorohhnoes 13y agoCome to think of it, I've never looked at inbound stuff. You'd think outbound would be where all the spam problems come from, though.
- sliverstorm 13y agoIf you block 25 outbound, people's mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) could not deliver mail to servers that don't run SSL or TLS (465, 587)
- werid 13y agoLots of ISPs does this. They require you to relay via their SMTP-server.
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- betterunix 13y agoI do not think that is an exhaustive list. The only thing it excludes are commercial operations, so I would assume that yes, you can run personal services (even services you share freely with friends or strangers), but that you cannot try to monetize those services. IANAL though.
- pyre 13y agoI think that they might have an issue with you hosting the "Next Facebook" from your house, even if it's not a commercial operation.
- cmatteri 13y agoOr P2P services, which could potentially present a greater threat to Google. Only a small fraction of network users are willing and able to run a personal server, and even those that do aren't capable of competing with Google in terms of hardware. Decentralized content sharing could remove those obstacles, and a high bandwidth network could facilitate the adoption of P2P services.
- sounds 13y agoI suspect that if the P2P client ran google's ads they wouldn't be opposed. Google is pretty savvy to P2P, but it does remove their ability to push ads at you. The latter is what would bother them.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoActually an email server that provides mail for you is a 'non commercial use', it would be commercial if you were offering other people email accounts on it and charging them for it. It gets a little bit dicey if you host your blog on a server (btw I just setup Ghost on an Rpi and it makes for a very cute little blog-pliance) and your blog has ads and provides you with an income stream.
- sliverstorm 13y agoAlthough if your blog has Adwords, maybe they wouldn't mind... :)
- Tomdarkness 13y agoHad Google actually taken action against anyone hosting a server? I guess this is more of a T&C clarification than anything else, i.e they would of not actually taken action against non-commercial servers anyway.
- cracell 13y agoStill no rule against it is much better than an unenforced rule against it.
- rch 13y agoOut of curiosity, why is there a prohibition on a particular type of activity and not just on bandwidth or similar? I understand that this is a fairly common provision, and not specific to Google Fiber at all.
- prutschman 13y agoI would expect this to be to allow market segmentation and price discrimination. A business might be willing and able to pay more for internet service than an individual, but less likely so if they could get the same thing for the individual's price.
- alightergreen 13y agoI'm sure this is coming with Fiber. But for early stage products (technically Fiber only has three "customers" right now-KC, Austin and Provo), one of the best things you can do to encourage uptake is keep your pricing drop-dead simple. I think they are just trying to balance that simplicity with keeping it fair by not allowing commercial servers. A couple businesses taking advantage of a system that wasn't built for them could wreck the speeds for everyone, and Fiber's reputation going forward.
- idupree 13y agoGoogle is smart enough to write an equation that says what usage patterns are too much to be fair usage of their network for $70/month. Then they could (in theory) publish it as part of their Terms and Conditions rather than have a "non-commercial" clause. I wonder how that would work in practice...
- maxsilver 13y agoBecause not all internet is equal. Most ISP's give home users a significant discount on their service, in exchange for agreeing to certain assumptions about their use. This is done because most home users could never afford internet, if they had to pay for full price. For example, in this area, a dedicated 20x20mb connection to the internet costs about $500USD per month (Metro Ethernet). You can do almost anything you want with this connection, since your paying for the full cost. Run servers, re-sell it to others at markup, host hundreds of websites on it, anything that's legal to do in the US, you can do with this connection. However, most people can't afford $500/month at their house, and most people would like to have faster download speeds than 20mb. These folks might instead buy a Comcast residential plan that offers 50mb down, 10mb up, for roughly $80 (which is what that plan costs here). $80/month is a lot cheaper than $500/month. The reason it's cheaper is because you agree to use it very lightly (no servers, no commercial use, no re-selling, keep total bandwidth use under 250-500GB, ect). What some people try to do, is 'cheat' that system. They try to buy a 'home' connection, and run their business-level services on it. ISP's crack down on that, because it's not fair to the others whose service that person is disrupting. However, some home users have legitimate home uses that appear to be cheats in the system. Running a Minecraft server for your friends is a 'valid' home use, but it sometimes conflicts with an ISP's rule (which might make an assumption that all servers are 'business class only' uses). - - - Sometimes it gets trickier -- where there's competition, anyone can buy high speed internet. (Urbanized Cities are usually ok here, lots of people sell Fiber lines / Metro Ethernet / Microwave / ect). But at your house, there's usually zero competition by law. A provider like Comcast might be the only option you have for high speed internet (perhaps they bought exclusive franchise rights to your city, or perhaps your state or local level government has created a law preventing new providers from competing in your area (this isn't just theoretical, both of those things commonly happen in the USA) At this point, your usually stuck. The provider was given monopoly status, but isn't being controlled by the regulations needed to ensure it doesn't abuse it's monopoly status. What can you do, besides raise a lot of complaints about that monopoly provider's rules. - - - TL/DR : Home users never pay for most of the speeds they get. Therefore, those speeds have to be shared among lots of people. ISP's use rules to make sure everyone shares nicely. By default, those rules are overly harsh. Good ISP's properly loosen the restrictions to allow obviously-good home uses.
- znowi 13y agoIf only it was that simple to make Google stop spying for NSA
- pekk 13y agoAs if NSA is the only problem there
- thisisnotatest 13y agoGoogle doesn't spy for the NSA. The NSA might be spying on Google, but that's not the same thing.
- wmf 13y agoReplying to subpoenas and warrants was recently redefined as "spying".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pfraze 13y agoDefinitely appreciate that policy change.
- ljlolel 13y agoWhat happened to net neutrality, Google?
- rmrfrmrf 13y agoThis is why I can't stand libertarians. FREEDOM MUST BE PROTECTED WITH LAWS. It's a precedent that has been set in stone since the Bill of Rights! ljlolel here is, with a straight face, DEFENDING the ability for AT&T to siphon bandwidth off of Google's residential fiber service in order to resell it. Does that really sound reasonable to anyone? Same deal with the GPL. "OMG I hate the GPL because it doesn't let me take free software and make it proprietary then add all kinds of DRM and shit and subjugate users." Boo fucking hoo! The intent has always been USER freedom, not freedom for commercial entities are making a living attempting to peddle knockoff products at hiked-up prices.
- n09n 13y agoNo, as someone who lives on both sides of that comparison, I would like both kinds of freedom. I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive as long as we set up a few basic rules about the use of infrastructure that everyone needs. Most actual net neutrality proposals go way beyond what is necessary. Much like the GPL.
- nullc 13y agoBetter make sure you run adblock while browsing through your VPN to home- wouldn't want anything commercial to go on. It's all good: Google is just trying to protect you from the evils of money.
- nullc 13y agoWow, -1. I know I was being a bit snarky. But the definition of "commercial use" is horribly ambiguous, with basically no broad legally defined meaning. If viewing ads on Google wasn't a commercial use I could hardly imagine anything else being one... but presumably they don't intend to reject commercial uses that make them money. The whole idea about rejecting commercial uses is wrong-headed. It presumes that you can draw a bright line between someones activities being commercial or not. Really, just like the no-servers prohibition this is a frivolous field of use restriction which serves to act as an excuse for arbitrary enforcement.
- cenhyperion 13y agoThis is great news. Although I doubt they would crack down on people running some low traffic servers for personal use either way, it's good that it is officially clarified.
- api 13y agoCan't have faster home Internet lead to decentralization...
- mtarnovan 13y agoSlightly off topic, but browsing the comments on this thread I'm just amazed how good and cheap Internet has become here (Romania) compared to some of the prices out there. A major local provider recently announced a new 1Gbps plan for about 18$/month. I'm currently on their 50Mbps plan, and I get just that: 5MBytes/s up/down.
- breischl 13y agoI'm reading this while I wait for a 10MB upload to crawl to completion on my 768Kbps up connection that costs $40/month. Which is especially sad because I live less than two miles from the dead center of Denver. So yeah, I'm just a bit jealous.
- nwh 13y agoI pay $70USD a month for a barely functioning ADSL line in Australia that might hit 40KB/s on a good day. It's literally faster for me to walk to a place in the city that has fibre and upload files there.
- blhack 13y agoDoesn't this change...nothing? They have always allowed you to run non-commercial servers, haven't they?
- teraflop 13y agoNo, the original wording was pretty draconian and attracted some complaints: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues-awful-isp-tradition-banning-servers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues... Key phrase: "Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection"
- ivanbrussik 13y agoEXTRA! New WATER company opening throughout the USA but doesn't allow HOT water. Google is shit. I hope the US government smacks them for this.
- rsingel 13y agoI still don't think this comports with the net neutrality rules, which focus on network management at a user/protocol level. Commercial/non-commercial is a business distinction -- which is exactly what net neutrality was meant to stop (e.g. Comcast throttling BitTorrent). Google Fiber shouldn't care a whit if my server is commercial or non-commercial (what does that even mean?) If my usage hurts the network, then GF can throttle my connection in some way that is disclosed as a policy and which is considered reasonable. This is a half-assed compromise and it's not in line with either the spirit or the clear language of net neutrality. (Full Disclosure: I wrote the Wired article that set off this storm.)
- ape4 13y agoI run a very non-busy website on my home server. Its got ads so I guess its a business. Seems petty to ban such things. (Not on Google Fiber)
- kbenson 13y agoThe friction in these situations generally comes from the hand-wavey definition of server. Google doesn't care about your website as it currently exists. They do care if it turns into boingboing, or something more commercial. Clearly defining the point at which the line is crossed hamstrings them when unforseen situations arise. Not clearly defining it allows for capricious enforcement. At either end of the spectrum one party loses out. This middle ground allows for both parties to be happy much of the time, but that's not to say no improvements can be made. I would hope serious proposals for change would take both parties into account and try to find a better compromise.
- njharman 13y ago> They do care if it turns into boingboing Why? Really why? I'm buying a certain number of bits per second. They don't need to know nor should care about the content of those bits. If they oversubscribe and sell bandwidth "bursting" up to X, but only a small fraction of X for a sustained period then they should have to advertise that clearly and not claim "X bandwidth connection". Rather than burying it in a TOS.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- piratebroadcast 13y agoSite looks like shit. Just saying.
- ilaksh 13y agoAren't there a ton of people who moved out there specifically to run their startups on Google Fiber? So all of them are breaking the terms supposedly.