Anticompetitive behavior when they clearly state the price? Of all the things that lock you in to any provider once you are at any scale, data isn’t the biggest one.
If you have a massive amount of data, you can always get AWS to transfer it to you via a Snowball for $30/TB + a $300 fee.
IANAL, but I don't believe stating a price has any impact on whether it is anticompetitive or not. If the behavior is anticompetitive, it doesn't matter if other people do it too and state their price as well.
Giving you an option to only bulk egress is not the same either, since the most common scenario for egress would be operational day-to-day inter-network scenarios.
If there is an unreasonably high fee for exiting a provider's cloud, to any other network location, on an operational basis, it is actively discouraging exiting the provider's services creating a kind of price barrier that could be cost prohibitive for operational inter-networking.
Operational inter-networking, to me, encourages competition not discourages it.
For example, perhaps I want to use Microsoft Azure's Data Factory to move data from AWS S3 to Redshift. It is not possible as far as I know without egress from AWS to Microsoft's network, and then back again. But surely these clouds are connected with peering relationships making the cost of ingress/egress negligible, so why is this not allowed? That would allow users of the cloud to freely mix and match services from among many clouds.
The world I see today does not seem to encourage such competition.
Wow, I hadn't seen this. This is quite cool. So clearly somebody else at Cloudflare saw the same concern I do and came up with a creative solution. Interesting that AWS isn't playing though.
One factor could be while of course they are peered it might be paid peering or if they allowed the traffic unmetered it would upset other free peering arrangements due to subsequent asymmetrical transfer rates.
I thought anticompetitive behavior was the exact opposite of price gouging. You sell below cost to put your competitors out of business. Evidently AWS isn't doing that with bandwidth.
AWS bandwidth fees make a multi-cloud infra a less likely design or migration choice by their customers, leading to lock-in.
> Service providers may attempt to “lock in” customers to prevent them from switching to alternative products, technologies, or suppliers. Customer lock-in involves raising customers’ switching costs to the point that the cost of switching outweighs the potential benefits from switching.
Egress is expensive, therefore you're less likely to use other cheaper cloud vendors to host some part of your infra and keep everything inside aws network (as internal aws bandwidth is free even halfway across the world). Also if you have huge amount of data, moving them out of aws into another cloud would net you a hefty bandwidth bills so you're less likely to consider moving.
the best form of competition will be simpler distributed compute, with the ability to more seamlessly process workloads across end user device, edge compute and cloud.
of course, AWS will play there too, but doesn't mean the overall ratios won't tilt towards the edge (although plenty of data "left" for the clouds since overall data will continue to grow).
