To anyone who thinks google is lying by calling this "unlimited" consider this:
When you go to a restaurant they will serve you free water and give you free napkins. If you asked the waitress how much water you were allowed to have she would probably say "as much as you want". This does not mean you can connect a hose to their water supply and start selling the water. You can not pull up with a large truck and start unloading boxes of their napkins because you can have "as much as you want".
There are common sense limitations on unlimited services, and I do not think google is crossing any lines here.
Surprised none of the indignant commenters are opening a food truck in front of every olive garden. The unlimited Soup Salad and Breadsticks could be resold for pure profit!
Surprised none of the indignant commenters are opening a food truck in front of every olive garden. The unlimited Soup Salad and Breadsticks could be resold for pure profit!
This is pretty much exactly the argument I'm hearing from people that think Google is doing a terrible thing here.
Nobody really expects unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth and other resources are limited, so it's perfectly reasonable to expect some (common sense) limitations.
What is not reasonable is saying "you can use your bandwidth for this, but you cannot use it for that". This is what people are complaining about.
If Google doesn't want people to use unreasonable amounts of bandwidth they should just say so. There's no need to use words like "server" in their TOS, because in the best case it just makes things complicated and vague.
I think this might be more like going to a buffet that advertises you can eat "Anything On The Cart™", and then tells you you can't eat the potatoes which are right there on the cart, in the same dish as every other thing you can eat.
Then you find out that there are potatoes in many of the dishes, though only one is all potato. Does the rule apply to those dishes? At what point does it become a potato dish? Remember, eat the wrong one and you might get kicked out.
However, if I go to an all you can eat buffet, I don't expect all the food to be gone during lunch hour. it doesn't matter if its peak hour, if they take full price and all I got was the bread an water, I would call it fraud.
Up to 12 dishes is not a acceptable advertisement for such restaurant, but why is it acceptable for an ISP? Should such restaurant, beyond being allowed to do as the ISP, also be allowed to have a TOS where limitation is put down? Maybe forbid athletes to eat anything above 300G, or its "for commercial purpose".
When you go to a restaurant they will serve you free water and give you free napkins. If you asked the waitress how much water you were allowed to have she would probably say "as much as you want". This does not mean you can connect a hose to their water supply and start selling the water. You can not pull up with a large truck and start unloading boxes of their napkins because you can have "as much as you want".
There are common sense limitations on unlimited services, and I do not think google is crossing any lines here.