Early-Google really fucked moron salespeople at most of their vendors (well, technically the salespeople also got paid, so the only morons were the investors). People sold space with power/cooling included at ratios which were unsustainable, and Google's people were more than willing to sign contracts with the facilities at those prices. Then Google "fully utilized" what they had in the contract, which really screwed their colo providers.

OTOH, this was in the colo/bandwidth/fiber nuclear winter of 2001-2004, so maybe some vendors were happy to have some revenue, but there were cases where the Google stuff was at negative overall margin on variable costs (i.e. the vendor would have been better off shutting down the power plant vs. selling to Google).

Using what you paid for is not unethical. Selling what you can't provide is, so if the colo can't keep up it's not Google's fault.

It's like renting a hotel room and then running the water/power/etc. 24x7 (and via cable to outdoors to power a factory for your 24h stay).

Sure... If hotels advertised unlimited water and power. I similarly don't feel bad for a restaurant that loses money on an all you can eat buffet.

There is "unlimited" and there is "reasonable and customary so let's not waste energy metering it".

Heh. Everyone did that at the time, because the colos didn't know better. I had a small 300ish installation in a tier 1 provider in the Northeast, and at one point in 2004 they had to tell me they couldn't provide the power for my new racks because they were literally out of circuits. Violation of contract, but they had no choice.

> People sold space with power/cooling included at ratios which were unsustainable

Do we have an ethical duty to make sure our counter-parties are always making sustainable offers?

"Unconscionable" contracts are legally void, so to some extent, yes.

Depends. What's your view on Steve Jobs and Wozniak's phone phreaking?

What, exactly, is dishonest about it?