This post is not very fair, and seems to have started with a conclusion "big company screwing their customers," instead of really digging in to learn why things

This post is not very fair, and seems to have started with a conclusion "big company screwing their customers," instead of really digging in to learn why things are the way they are for good non-customer-screwing reasons. The post DOES actually call out that wholesale bandwidth is symmetric, but then jumps to the OPPOSITE of the correct interpretation of that: That AWS's pricing to the end customer should be equally symmetric, and the fact that it isn't is evidence of AWS's customer-screwing behavior. The actual reason is that AWS's customers, like those of other cloud providers, are running externally-facing services that mostly send data OUT to their users. Given the inherent symmetry in wholesale bandwidth, it means that AWS has to build out based on their total egress bandwidth. As customers egress more data their users (or wherever/whoever), AWS has to not only pay for more wholesale bandwidth, they also have to build out all the additional infrastructure (routers, etc) to support it. It's very expensive. The ingress bandwidth, being less than the egress bandwidth already noted above, therefore is effectively free to AWS, and they can charge very low rates to their customers for it.