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By launching Google Fiber, they have a huge wedge for any "Fast Lane" negotiations with the ISPs. If ISPs try to charge content providers too much, and start to impact Google's bottom line, Google can simply start expanding Fiber to bite into the ISP's business.
It effectively sets a ceiling for how much the ISPs can charge Google or it's customers, since Google can simply emphasize Fiber if it becomes more cost effective vs. paying the Fast Lane tolls.
and by giving away for free the most expensive part of hosting - power - for the folks colo'ing with them, it is almost free for netflix and others to do this. it makes the offering something that other ISPs won't be able to compete with easily if at all.
At Netflix's scale I'm almost certain that paying for the space and power would still be much cheaper than having to pay direct bandwidth costs / external CDN costs.
I wonder how they decide who gets to put a server in there for free, I always thought it was just a matter of money.
It's good that Google is doing this, and it's great PR at this moment in time, but Netflix has been offering ISPs their Open Connect Appliance for a while now:
This is one aspect that confuses me about the whole net neutrality debate revolving around Netflix. They basically provide a CDN point of presence to any major ISP who wants it, and that's less outside bandwidth the ISP needs to worry about. It's a win for everyone, except for much smaller competitors who don't have the budget to offer a free appliance, nor do they have the popularity for an ISP to want to power their device. Netflix is an odd poster child for the net neutrality debate.
The issue is that (as shown by Level3 [1]) the congestion isn't really at the intranet but within regional ISP networks. The regional ISPs (Comcast/TWC etc) realized that actually not spending money to augment their networks to accommodate for the traffic can be more profitable than actually providing a better service to their customers.
When the traffic on their network is congested, they can force companies like Netflix to actually run a fiber directly to their data center not only they can have Netflix pay for it (and therefore they don't have to pay anything to their uplink (such as Level3 and others), they also will receive money from these companies in order to not throttle their traffic.
And they can do all that only because they have regional monopoly, and users don't have anywhere else to go.
If Google Fiber spreads to enough locations, the ISPs could start seeing effects on their subscribers. Content providers can dismiss the ISPs demand for money, and Google and content providers can go and say, "get all your favorite services, fastest on Google Fiber". The ISPs would be forced to put content on the "fast lane" or risk losing customers.
Unfortunately, Fiber is not available in enough locations yet.
If Google became as large as AT&T and Comcast they'd be worst. I'm sure At&T and Comcast would support making Google's bread and butter (say Adwords or tracking data) open source or more open too.
Google makes a lot of their money when people download /upload /view a lot of files and videos since they slap ads on them. At&t etc must carry them, so there's a conflict of interests. No one is really on your side, just some of their interests may align with ours..for now.
...and still prohibit running servers in our Terms of Service, contrary to the net neutrality principle of allowing users to use any legal software on the network.
CORRECTED:
...and still restrict running servers based on commercial use rather than anything related to network impact in our Terms of Service, contrary to the net neutrality principle of allowing users to use any legal software on the network.
And why shouldn't I be able to run a commercial server? But apparently a commercial client is okay? You don't mind me making money, you don't mind traffic, but you care very much which direction TCP connections are initiated, but only when there might be commercial activity involved? Why?
(And "Too much traffic" isn't a valid answer here: if I have a client, I can use as much bandwidth as I like — respecting the other sections of the ToS, which are outside the scope of this discussion.)
Because they've priced their service and agreements at a level that assumes that someone isn't running a business using their super-cheap Google Fiber connection.
It's all about economics, SLAs, etc. and network management.
They've already addressed this directly by mentioning how they plan on launching a business product eventually.
If you get a commercial account/connection then you should be fine.
Even if it is not technical, it might be like garbage services in my area where commercial operations subsidize residential operations. Residential connections might be getting a discount that is paid by commercial entities and you would be cheating their pricing model.
I had never considered that before but I presume you're onto something there. There's likely some commercial interest or government subsidy/tax implications that come into play as to why business and residential pay different rates for the same line.
> Unless you're trying to run a commercial website from your apartment
Actually, I'd say regulating on commercial vs. noncommercial rather than traffic or even, as a fairly blunt tool, a straight server ban is actually more of a violation of the "any legal software" rule (rather, its equally a violation of that rule, and its no longer even superficially about network management, the potential basis for exception to the rule, but instead is pure market segregation.)
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