The pricing is insane, yes and no. They are most definitely not out of their minds. Networking at scale is complicated and expensive. Of course, at the economi

The pricing is insane, yes and no. They are most definitely not out of their minds. Networking at scale is complicated and expensive. Of course, at the economies of scale providers like AWS and GCP it does become much cheaper. No one in datacenters pays per gigabyte, but you do in the cloud because you're paying for so much more than just data-go-out. There is a lot of hardware and glass that goes into you being able to reliably transfer a gigabyte of data in or out of AWS. They peer with hundreds of providers and need to constantly monitor and balance traffic in hundreds of locations. When you buy your own transit, you pay for say 1 gigabit per second with Level 3. What if Level 3 has an issue? Or that fiber is cut? Well now you need to pay for 1gbps with GTT. What if the path to your customers isn't optimal via GTT? Well now you need to pay for 1gbps with Verizon. Huge transit speeds, combined with huge IP spaces and huge routing tables means hugely expensive routers anywhere they are doing significant amounts of peering (which is hundreds of locations). You as the customer don't care, you just expect your gigabyte to go where you want it, no matter what. Does all this really cost AWS $0.02/GB? Hell no. They want you in their ecosystem. If it's cheap and easy for you to send your data out (as it is practically free to get your data in), then you'd just leave anytime you wanted.