[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Aren't high Egress fees clearly anti competi...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Ask HN: Aren't high Egress fees clearly anti competitive?
        
       I think we are all used to the various cloud providers having very
       high egress fees. The reason for that being that it leads to a very
       strong lock in to the cloud providers services. Want to use some
       processing using your own servers on data in GCS or S3 ? Good luck.
       Isn't that clearly anti competitive and should be regulated ?
        
       Author : lysecret
       Score  : 5 points
       Date   : 2023-02-02 21:49 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | I think Cloudflare has been successful somewhat at making AWS
       | improve transfer pricing.
       | 
       | Cheap data transfer attracts trouble, however. 10 cents a
       | gigabyte is much cheaper than buying a CD or DVD, but pirates
       | like to pirate 10x or 100x more than they could ever buy so I
       | think it slows people down.
       | 
       | Circa 2000 when Napster and Limewire were big, Cornell University
       | dealt with it by putting a usage cap on undergraduate IPs and
       | charging for data over the cap. There are some kids who will have
       | their parents pay a few $1000 of parking tickets and data
       | transfer a semester on their bursar bill but it sure slowed the
       | others down.
        
         | swarfield wrote:
         | Cloudflare's R2 (S3 Competitor) has no egress fees.
        
         | traverseda wrote:
         | Why is it the universities job to prevent piracy?
        
       | toast0 wrote:
       | Egress pricing is crazy, but I don't know that it's anti-
       | competitive? I don't think it fits the definition of tying,
       | because you egress isn't unrelated to the other services.
       | 
       | There's certainly a lot of margin in their egress pricing, and
       | that may allow them to operate portions of their service with
       | smaller margins, and maybe that's anti-competitive, but it's not
       | like any of their services are low cost, so I don't think there's
       | really a case that they're dumping and using bandwidth to cover
       | it. Everything is expensive. There's no law against that.
       | 
       | If you have enough egress, and you can't negotiate better pricing
       | (which is an option!), you should probably consider AWS direct
       | connect (or similar) and send your egress out through cheaper
       | transit elsewhere.
        
       | g_p wrote:
       | The bandwidth alliance (https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-
       | alliance/) seems to be trying to do something about this, and
       | build an ecosystem of companies that don't charge for egress to
       | others. Presumably this is backed by legitimate open peering in
       | internet exchanges, rather than metered links.
       | 
       | I believe there are some challengers in this group like
       | backblaze, wasabi, oracle cloud etc.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-02-02 23:02 UTC)