Google’s call for open Internet hedged in its own rules
Google’s call for open Internet hedged in its own rules
By Lindsay Wise | McClatchy Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — When Google was just a mighty search engine,
the company championed an open, unfettered Internet. Now that it’s selling
ultra-fast broadband Internet and TV service in Kansas City, Mo., with plans to
repeat the service elsewhere, the tech giant bars customers from hosting
servers on the Google Fiber network without written permission.
In some tech circles, that’s seen as at least a partial
reversal by Google, one that might undercut the company’s position in coming
regulatory battles over the concept known as net neutrality.
In the past, Google has been an outspoken advocate for
net neutrality, a set of regulations that prevent Internet service providers
from giving a preference to any type of Internet traffic over another or
blocking any lawful content, applications, services or devices.
Google Fiber spokeswoman Jenna Wandres said in a
statement that the company’s stance on net neutrality hadn’t changed.
“Google is a strong supporter of the open Internet,”
Wandres said.
Yet in the fine print of Google Fiber’s terms of service,
legally binding language forbids customers from hosting any type of server
“unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you to do
so.”
“It really does feel like an about-face,” said Dan
Andresen, an associate professor of computing and information sciences at
Kansas State University. “There is kind of a sense of betrayal or concern that
we thought Google was different (from other Internet service providers) and it
turns out they aren’t.”
He said the policy might have a chilling effect on users,
particularly entrepreneurs who may have moved to the Kansas City area to take
advantage of Google Fiber’s lightning connection speed of one gigabit per
second. That’s roughly 100 times faster than most home broadband connections in
the United States.
Even Skype, a nanny cam, Slingbox or the program that
monitors the solar panel on Andresen’s home could be considered servers, and
therefore technically prohibited under Google Fiber’s terms of service, he
said.
“Google has made this effectively a consumption-only
device while marketing all these cool things you can do with this gigabit
connection,” Andresen said. “Now they’re coming and saying, ‘Oh, but wait,
there’s a whole huge class of things that now we are forbidding.’ ”
Indeed, often overlooked is that Google Fiber promises
not just light-speed downloads, but also uploads of a gigabit-per-second, a
full thousand times faster than most home consumers experience. That capability
makes running a server – the sort of computer that can host a website or
channel peer-to-peer file-swapping operations – far more practical at home.
The net neutrality issue surfaced in a complaint filed by
Douglas McClendon of Lawrence, Kan. – an area where Google Fiber has yet to
announce any plans to sell Internet hookups – with the Federal Communications
Commission.
Google had until this week to reply. On Monday, the
company argued in a letter to the FCC that its terms of service run consistent
with industry standards and don’t violate the government’s open Internet rules.
The company noted in the letter that Google Fiber is
intended as a residential offering only, not a business product. Despite
general language in the terms of service, Google Fiber won’t prevent the legal,
noncommercial use of applications such as multi-player gaming,
videoconferencing and home security, the letter said.
Google Fiber plans to offer a small business service in
the future for customers who want to run commercial servers on the network,
said Wandres, the Google spokeswoman. She couldn’t estimate how much such a
product would cost or predict when it would launch.
“We will allow small business servers on the network,”
she said.
Although Google’s letter to the FCC ignited some outrage
in the tech blogosphere, a few analysts found the reaction overblown.
Stacey Higginbotham, a blogger for GigaOM, wrote that the
development was a “tempest in a teapot” that she hoped would spark serious
debates over how to define servers and how to distinguish home broadband use
from business use. The distinction can be blurry when so many people work from
home or run startups from their basements, she said.
“Google will be at the forefront of these debates because
it’s trying to push the envelope on broadband offerings while still trying to
turn a profit,” Higginbotham wrote. “Like a bar owner or a central banker, it
has to encourage exuberance, while curbing the obvious harms of irrational
exuberance. That’s a tough line to walk.”
Google’s earliest days as a fledgling search engine
relied heavily on getting Internet bandwidth, robust capacity that its founders
commandeered surreptitiously on the campus of Stanford University.
Today, Google’s problem is that whenever customers buy
“unlimited” service for their homes, the Internet service provider is counting
on the customers using it “normally,” said Dan Wallach, a computer science
professor at Rice University.
Ordinary home users might stream Netflix movies or play
games online, Wallach said in an email, but they “generally don’t pull or push
a solid gigabit per second, flat out, all day long.”
“What Google is worried about is the possibility that
users will run full-blown Web services out of their homes and will truly run
that gigabit link flat out 24-7,” he said. “That sort of usage would crush
their backbone.”
If you were to shop for such a service commercially,
you’d pay much more than Google is charging, Wallach said. For example,
RackSpace, one of the big commercial providers, charges $0.12 per gigabyte, or
$120 per terabyte. Regularly moving such large chunks of data over Google
Fiber-sized bandwidth would be unaffordable for most home consumers.
A gigabit connection in most American cities can easily
cost $500 a month, compared with $70 per month from Google Fiber.
“Google’s prices are either the bargain of the century,”
Wallach said, “or Google needs to have terms of service that discourage people
from running data centers in their garages.”
Google Fiber earlier reversed itself on how open its
network would be. In 2010, Google said its fiber optic network would “operate
an ‘open access’ network, giving users the choice of multiple service
providers.” That meant it could lease its lines – distinctive because fiber
optic wires go directly to homes – to competitors such as Time Warner Cable or
Comcast. But last year, Google decided not to open the network to other
Internet service providers.
Email: lwise@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @lindsaywise
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/01/198327/googles-call-for-open-internet.html#.UfrksL0SVPw#storylink=cpy
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