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Ask HN: Aren’t high Egress fees clearly anti competitive?

17 points by lysecret ↗ HN
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 ?

9 comments

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PaulHoule
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
Cloudflare's R2 (S3 Competitor) has no egress fees.
traverseda
Why is it the universities job to prevent piracy?
flangola7
As the ASN operator don't they have a legal duty to shut down illegal operations from their network? Technically they probably only need to respond to filed complaints, but this strategy likely reduces their workload while not impacting the large majority of non-pirating students.
traverseda
>As the ASN operator don't they have a legal duty to shut down illegal operations from their network?

Noooooooooooo

I mean I'm not a lawyer, I'm not even American, but I think that if they demonstrate that have the capability to police that sort of thing they become responsible for policing it. Where as responding to (or even forwarding) cease and desist letters opens them up to much less culpability.

In modern times I'd worry that actively trying to prevent piracy, taking concrete steps like blocking torrent protocols, could mean that you're no longer protected by safe harbour provisions in the DMCA. You start acting like you have the capability to be responsible for your users actions and then lose all kinds of safe harbour and common carrier provisions. It's part of the reason why ISPs don't use more aggressive traffic shaping, start blocking pirate sites and you start being responsible for all the pirate sites you missed.

PaulHoule
That is why a network operator might try discouraging this activity through their pricing structure. The self-interest of a network operator is to be not getting complaints and demands about the activities of the customer and many network operators would rather a person who generates complaints go be a customer of some other operator and if that can be done with no customer contact all the better.
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.

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.

shyn3
This is just going to lead to lock in to a set of services which conform to a way of thinking and lead to you being banned from all if you get banned from one.