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Are they still extorting customers by price gouging bandwidth? Maybe one day I’ll wake up to news they’ve decided to charge for capacity instead of transfer.

abtinf 7y ago
> Are they still extorting customers... That is a contradiction in terms. According to the OED: Extort means to "obtain (something) by force, threats, or other unfair means." Customer means "a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business" Thus, extortion is a coercive relationship--we call the target of extortion a victim, not a customer. The relationship of a vendor and customer is voluntary.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  It's nice to see that the increasing amount of hyperbole here isn't impacting everyone.
  - abtinf 7y ago
    It's not just hyperbole, it's grossly unjust. Amazon quite rightly charge a higher price for some portions of AWS--transparently, up front, with tools to assess usage and estimate fees beforehand--because they created a product that many organizations believe provides extraordinary value. And for the sin of earning a profit through voluntary trade, a vocal minority of HN damns them every single time AWS is mentioned. Every time we let this evil behavior go unchallenged, all productive individuals are diminished.
    - TechBro8615 7y ago
      Wait, are you saying it’s grossly unjust to criticize the pricing of Amazon’s cloud product? Just to be clear: Amazon is not paying a variable cost for how many bits are transferred over their wires. And the standard, prior to cloud, and still in colocation, was to charge for capacity (i.e. $/gbps) rather than transfer (i.e $/gb). They are making massive, massive profits by this pricing arrangement. The cost of sustaining 100 gbps transfer for 30 days on Amazon is orders of magnitude higher than paying for one month of 100 gbps of IP transit. They’ve normalized a pricing structure that is disconnected from any actual cost basis. You’re free to pay for it, but it’s quite amusing to say criticizing that is unjust.
      - pests 7y ago
        "[...]disconnected from any actual cost basis[...]" Not everything is priced based on the cost of it's inputs. In this case it seems to be what the market will bear.
        sudosysgen 7y ago
        Which in this case is exorbitant and is something that we should oppose. Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers, and in some cases is a red-mark of market failure (not in this one, as of yet).
        rumanator 7y ago
        > Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers To be fair, that's how all products are priced in general: production cost defines the lower bound and what customers are willing to pay defines the upper bound, and the goal is to maximize what the customer pays.
        sudosysgen 7y ago
        The theory is that as time goes on, the prices moves from what the market will bear to become closer to the cost of production. When this does not happen, it is a failure of the market.
- gdulli 7y ago
  Terms are commonly used metaphorically to show the speaker considers a given situation to resemble that term qualitatively but not exactly. Very commonly. Like, it's practically fundamental to our communication.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  You can coerce someone to be your customer.
- thayne 7y ago
  The grandparent's argument is that AWS is extorting the customer to remain a customer by making the cost of moving data out of AWS prohibitevly high. I don't think it is actual extortion (at least legally), since the egress prices are public, and you could argue if the customer had done due diligence they would have known the price when becoming a customer in the first place. But if they had changed the price after a customer became sufficiently invested in AWS, that would be using "unfair means", to obtain the customer's continued business.
- x3blah 7y ago
  220 pan.alephnull.com dictd 1.12.1/rf on Linux 4.4.0-1-amd64 <auth.mime> <114924196.15062.1589085014@pan.alephnull.com> 150 15 definitions retrieved 151 "Extortion" gcide "The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48" Extortion \Ex*tor"tion\, n. [F. extorsion.] 1. The act of extorting; the act or practice of wresting anything from a person by force, by threats, or by any undue exercise of power; undue exaction; overcharge. [1913 Webster] 2. (Law) The offense committed by an officer who corruptly claims and takes, as his fee, money, or other thing of value, that is not due, or more than is due, or before it is due. --Abbott. [1913 Webster] 3. That which is extorted or exacted by force. Syn: Oppression; rapacity; exaction; overcharge. [1913 Webster] . 151 "extortion" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)" extortion n 1: an exorbitant charge 2: unjust exaction (as by the misuse of authority); "the extortion by dishonest officials of fees for performing their sworn duty" 3: the felonious act of extorting money (as by threats of violence) . "an exhorbitant charge"
sixdimensional 7y ago
Actually, I do genuinely wonder if some day this will be seen as anticompetitive behavior (a form of lock-in via higher than reasonable egress fees).
- scarface74 7y ago
  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.
  - sixdimensional 7y ago
    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.
    - sdfdsfsdf222 7y ago
      The Bandwidth Alliance was meant to solve this problem. Azure and GCP have joined, AWS has not. https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

abtinf 7y ago

> Are they still extorting customers... That is a contradiction in terms. According to the OED: Extort means to "obtain (something) by force, threats, or other unfair means." Customer means "a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business" Thus, extortion is a coercive relationship--we call the target of extortion a victim, not a customer. The relationship of a vendor and customer is voluntary.

koheripbal 7y ago
It's nice to see that the increasing amount of hyperbole here isn't impacting everyone.
- abtinf 7y ago
  It's not just hyperbole, it's grossly unjust. Amazon quite rightly charge a higher price for some portions of AWS--transparently, up front, with tools to assess usage and estimate fees beforehand--because they created a product that many organizations believe provides extraordinary value. And for the sin of earning a profit through voluntary trade, a vocal minority of HN damns them every single time AWS is mentioned. Every time we let this evil behavior go unchallenged, all productive individuals are diminished.
  - TechBro8615 7y ago
    Wait, are you saying it’s grossly unjust to criticize the pricing of Amazon’s cloud product? Just to be clear: Amazon is not paying a variable cost for how many bits are transferred over their wires. And the standard, prior to cloud, and still in colocation, was to charge for capacity (i.e. $/gbps) rather than transfer (i.e $/gb). They are making massive, massive profits by this pricing arrangement. The cost of sustaining 100 gbps transfer for 30 days on Amazon is orders of magnitude higher than paying for one month of 100 gbps of IP transit. They’ve normalized a pricing structure that is disconnected from any actual cost basis. You’re free to pay for it, but it’s quite amusing to say criticizing that is unjust.
    - pests 7y ago
      "[...]disconnected from any actual cost basis[...]" Not everything is priced based on the cost of it's inputs. In this case it seems to be what the market will bear.
      - sudosysgen 7y ago
        Which in this case is exorbitant and is something that we should oppose. Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers, and in some cases is a red-mark of market failure (not in this one, as of yet).
        rumanator 7y ago
        > Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers To be fair, that's how all products are priced in general: production cost defines the lower bound and what customers are willing to pay defines the upper bound, and the goal is to maximize what the customer pays.
        sudosysgen 7y ago
        The theory is that as time goes on, the prices moves from what the market will bear to become closer to the cost of production. When this does not happen, it is a failure of the market.
gdulli 7y ago
Terms are commonly used metaphorically to show the speaker considers a given situation to resemble that term qualitatively but not exactly. Very commonly. Like, it's practically fundamental to our communication.
saagarjha 7y ago
You can coerce someone to be your customer.
thayne 7y ago
The grandparent's argument is that AWS is extorting the customer to remain a customer by making the cost of moving data out of AWS prohibitevly high. I don't think it is actual extortion (at least legally), since the egress prices are public, and you could argue if the customer had done due diligence they would have known the price when becoming a customer in the first place. But if they had changed the price after a customer became sufficiently invested in AWS, that would be using "unfair means", to obtain the customer's continued business.
x3blah 7y ago
220 pan.alephnull.com dictd 1.12.1/rf on Linux 4.4.0-1-amd64 <auth.mime> <114924196.15062.1589085014@pan.alephnull.com> 150 15 definitions retrieved 151 "Extortion" gcide "The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48" Extortion \Ex*tor"tion\, n. [F. extorsion.] 1. The act of extorting; the act or practice of wresting anything from a person by force, by threats, or by any undue exercise of power; undue exaction; overcharge. [1913 Webster] 2. (Law) The offense committed by an officer who corruptly claims and takes, as his fee, money, or other thing of value, that is not due, or more than is due, or before it is due. --Abbott. [1913 Webster] 3. That which is extorted or exacted by force. Syn: Oppression; rapacity; exaction; overcharge. [1913 Webster] . 151 "extortion" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)" extortion n 1: an exorbitant charge 2: unjust exaction (as by the misuse of authority); "the extortion by dishonest officials of fees for performing their sworn duty" 3: the felonious act of extorting money (as by threats of violence) . "an exhorbitant charge"

sixdimensional 7y ago

Actually, I do genuinely wonder if some day this will be seen as anticompetitive behavior (a form of lock-in via higher than reasonable egress fees).

scarface74 7y ago
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.
- sixdimensional 7y ago
  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.
  - sdfdsfsdf222 7y ago
    The Bandwidth Alliance was meant to solve this problem. Azure and GCP have joined, AWS has not. https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/