[liberationtech] Petition Google over banning "Servers" on Google Fiber?

[KheOps]

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Hi all,

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 01:24:07AM +0200, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> Thank you EFF for the well-written reminder:
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues-awful-isp-tradition-banning-servers

[...]

> We should petition Google to get rid of this. Does anyone know if EFF
> planning such an action, or do you have contacts to organizational
> networks to get it going properly?

A petition is probably worth giving a try, but in the end Google are on their infrastructure and selling access under their terms of service, so it may be quite a difficult challenge. Even more difficult since, as far as I understand, many other operators do the same on the market.

There are similar issues in France: a few ISPs providing high-speed fiber connection forbid in the same way hosting a server at home (unless you pay more). In addition, some do not provide a fixed IP address to practically make things more difficult.

We all understand that this violates Net Neutrality and prevents citizens from reclaiming control of their data to have a decent level of privacy. We subsequently understand that this is a serious issue from a democracy point of view, knowing governments' surveillance practices.

Now, in case it could be of any use in the US, in France & Europe I see two types of initiatives that try to push things in a better direction:
- - at the European Parliament some advocacy groups have tried to push the fact that a company could not say that they sell "internet access" if what they sell contains violations to Net Neutrality (I don't know the details on the situation of this political battle, but you get the idea);
- - in France, we have more and more associative (non-profit) ISPs providing internet access to small numbers of people - the core ideas are to provide a neutral access (to the extent permitted by law) and promote decentralization (as in internet) through the creation of many little structures; the oldest and biggest, French Data Network (FDN) created a Federation (FFDN) in which the smaller and more local ones are gathered; we would really like this kind of initiative to spread - take a look there http://www.ffdn.org, some posts are in English

All the best,
KheOps
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