[londons_explore]

I think it shows market failure when someone can offer exactly the same service as a competitor (an S3 API) for an 80% lower price, and not almost immediately take over the whole market.

I think governments need to step in and require that compute platforms like AWS are split up into constituent parts, and there is no cost disadvantage to mix-n-matching between suppliers. Eg. VM's on Azure and storage across the road in AWS should not require payment of egress fees that wouldn't be payable within either providers network.

[adam_arthur]

There's a natural stickiness to cloud infra and SaaS which lends providers a pseudo monopolistic pricing power, even when competitors are present.

Some regulation requiring a common API and one click solution to transfer between providers would help solve this. Needs to be implemented intelligently though

[londons_explore]

One simple way to do it would be if the FTC announced:

> From January 1st 2023, we will consider it anti-competitive for cloud providers to price internal service bandwidth at a rate lower than internet bandwidth to a competing service.

[throwaway48484]

Big companies like Amazon, Google or Microsoft could set the price to zero, and their smaller competitors would be losing a lot of money each month? Basically an easy way to get rid of the competition

Sounds like it would mostly benefit the large companies

It would be better if internet was considered basic infrastructure and funded by taxes like roads.

[adam_arthur]

Yeah, a lot of thought needs to be put into the actual rule, but something along these lines... While accounting for unintended consequences

[fabian2k]

For storage you need trust, an S3 competitor doesn't help me if they lose my data or are unreliable. It takes time to earn that trust, and it's far from easy for small competitors to do that.

[vlovich123]

There's also performance / availability / capacity things to consider as well. It may be for some, but the $/storage isn't typically the whole story.