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inopinatus

How would you like to pay for the outbound bandwidth you’re using? Choose:

1. metered gigabytes

2. bundled in with some other resource you’re paying for (which one?)

3. fixed allowance then it stops working altogether

4. monthly charge per 95%ile of contractually provisioned mbps (i.e. old school ISP billing)

5. I just want something for nothing

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Whichever one doesn’t make it challenging for customers to switch to another provider. That may raise prices elsewhere (such as ingress fees), and the tradeoff is still likely to be net positive for the customer due to the increased competition.

That was option (2). The reductio ad absurdem hits like a train with that option. It’s a trap for new players. In that particular variant, the following year the same people will be complaining about how much ingress costs these days, and the same hapless regulators will feel the urge to be Seen To Do Something. Wash, rinse, repeat. Still, thanks for playing

The pro-competition regulators aren’t here to make your service cheap. They’re just trying to make sure that customers can exit and switch providers without artificial barriers. If you want to soak people for ingress fees, snd it’s easy for customers to switch, go ahead.

Bandwidth is not an artificial barrier. It’s real infrastructure, with a real cost. I should know, I once dropped a LINX core switch on my foot.

Amazon is doing the right thing by maintaining egress fees but waiving them on departure. Not because it’s free for them, but because there’s zero chance that this precipitates a mass exodus, because moving is still hard even if it’s slightly cheaper. They’ll likely even gain some customers. That is, they’ll absorb the cost with growth. Which is Amazon’s business strategy in a nutshell.

Bandwidth is not artificial, but Amazon’s pricing structure for it absolutely is artificial. As you point out, bandwidth is not free but Amazon didn’t charge for ingress. Now they’re taking that artificial pricing structure and making it equally artificial in a way that (somewhat) promotes competition.

All pricing is artificial. Money does not occur in nature. This is such a generic point that it isn’t worth debating. And if you think “but you know what I mean” then no, I really don’t. This sounds like someone who wants to have their cake and eat it, having a whinge when it turns out they have to pay the baker.

Metered GB is fine if there isn't a 8,000% markup. 200-300% would be much more reasonable and the angst over this would probably just go away.

They are also already doing 5 on ingress. But maybe you consider it 2.

I do consider it bundled - with services priced for data at rest. For data ingress, that seems quite right to me.

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