HACKER Q&A
📣 lysecret

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 ?

  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 g_p
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.

👤 toast0
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.