> That accurately describes Drive's infrastructure.
It accurately describes a piece of infrastructure that many (if not most major) services including drive use.
It does not describe drive, but it’s a moot point since there is nothing relevant about calling drive a CDN.
> Private calls are a different model from a public & shared link.
Not at all. There is nothing stopping a phone call being made to a radio station, or placed on speaker to an audience of multiple people. This is analogous to the use case of posting a link to Twitter or a Facebook group.
> There is nothing stopping a phone call being made to a radio station, or placed on speaker to an audience of multiple people. This is analogous to the use case of posting a link to Twitter or a Facebook group.
This is actually an excellent demonstration of why phone calls are a poor analogy for publicized Drive links: in the scenario that you describe, if the radio station has not gotten the consent of the caller to broadcast the call or the circumstances don't suggest the call will be broadcast (such as if someone calls the station's customer complaints line and that line is patched inappropriately into the broadcast circuits), in most states (and under FEC guidelines) the radio station could be held legally liable for violating the caller's privacy.
No such law exists for a Google drive document link.
Shared documents are their own thing and previous models don't really precisely fit them. There isn't really any precedent to say that Google's position here is wrong; arguments by analogy break down quickly. A Drive document can be used as a private scratch pad, a multi-user scratch space, or as a stored read-only piece of data intended for broad dissemination on a reliable content network; the technology doesn't distinguish the use cases, and Google applies more or less the same policies to all of them.
Can you provide a precedent for Google's position being wrong other than reasoning by analogy from other telecommunications infrastructure (which we already treat differently from Google Drive shared documents)?
[Edit: your comment changed after I posted mine]
Oh, if your primary concern is that Google reserves the right to get into private collaborations and modify access to those documents, that's something other than what I'm arguing. I'm personally ambivalent (their house and their rules... If you don't like the rules don't live in the house), but I can see why people would have more concern with that situation than the situation where they block wide-cast sharing via a view-only link.
> Can you provide a precedent for Google's position being wrong
You don’t need a legal precedent to determine what is wrong. You are making the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent here.
> Oh, if your primary concern is that Google reserves the right to get into private collaborations and modify access to those documents, that's something other than what I'm arguing.
They do, and ok.
> I'm personally ambivalent (their house and their rules... If you don't like the rules don't live in the house)
This is a sentiment that I generally agree with as life advice, but is a non-contribution to these kinds of discussion.
> but I can see why people would have more concern with that situation than the situation where they block wide-cast sharing via a view-only link.
There is no difference between a small scale collaboration and what you have chosen to label a ‘wide-cast’ link, other than how many people read the document.
It accurately describes a piece of infrastructure that many (if not most major) services including drive use.
It does not describe drive, but it’s a moot point since there is nothing relevant about calling drive a CDN.
> Private calls are a different model from a public & shared link.
Not at all. There is nothing stopping a phone call being made to a radio station, or placed on speaker to an audience of multiple people. This is analogous to the use case of posting a link to Twitter or a Facebook group.