> The trigger was outages in cloud services with sometimes significant impacts on other internet services. Shortly before, an approximately 15-hour outage of the AWS cloud in the US meant that not only Amazon's own streaming services but also Atlassian, Docker, Epic Games, and the Signal messenger were unavailable or severely restricted.
If I remember correctly, it was a us-east-1 issue specifically. Why is everyone hosted in us-east-1, especially in Europe where stable and reliable regions are available (eu-west-1, eu-west-3, ...)?
Is this really a good faith comment? Anyway the EU just fines US tech giants, it's part of doing business in the EU. It must be worthwhile, the fines must only amount to a small percentage of the lucre gathered there.
A good target for regulation of those clouds would be the inflated traffic pricing.
Either by a simple price limit on ordinary egress (e.g. max 1 EUR / TB to European providers which don't charge for peering/traffic), or by requiring them to peer at-cost with others and allowing the customers to choose such a peering for egress.
The current traffic pricing is extremely high, and makes it difficult to split your cloud installation between multiple providers.
Traffic pricing has to be understood as being, at least in part, a control against free-riding on the provider's networking architecture. The Data Act already gives EU customers a right to egress their data to another provider at cost, which all major cloud providers have implemented. But that doesn't (and shouldn't) mean that they have to give you a marginal-cost-only CDN.
If a multinational utility operates power grids in both the EU and the US, and a European company chooses to import power from the US grid, I don't know why EU would penalize the utility when the US grid has an outage. They really should be penalizing their European entities for failing to architect a local redundancy.
If EU's going to use this as an excuse to designate them as gatekeepers, maybe they should just block EU accounts from provisioning resources outside of Europe. These providers are taking all the blame for architectural decisions made entirely by their customers.
8 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 43.4 ms ] threadIf I remember correctly, it was a us-east-1 issue specifically. Why is everyone hosted in us-east-1, especially in Europe where stable and reliable regions are available (eu-west-1, eu-west-3, ...)?
Are we soon going to say Spotify, ASML, and Carl Zeiss are also gatekeepers?
Either by a simple price limit on ordinary egress (e.g. max 1 EUR / TB to European providers which don't charge for peering/traffic), or by requiring them to peer at-cost with others and allowing the customers to choose such a peering for egress.
The current traffic pricing is extremely high, and makes it difficult to split your cloud installation between multiple providers.
If EU's going to use this as an excuse to designate them as gatekeepers, maybe they should just block EU accounts from provisioning resources outside of Europe. These providers are taking all the blame for architectural decisions made entirely by their customers.