I don't see how committed spend discounts are different from contractual B2B pricing in every other industry. I can also see why egress bandwidth can be expensive for e.g. server farms, the contention ratio is (usually) significantly higher than it is for ingress.
How would you propose PAYG/SaaS bandwidth pricing is altered to be more competitive, or for example Amazon Glacier retrieval is heinously expensive for retrieval but it's transparent and IMO has a fair reflection of the underlying costs involved.
And the fact that they have made no move to reduce pricing to compete with R2 suggests that they are not actually motivated by making a profit on egress. I strongly suspect that they are motivated by lock-in: AWS wants you to minimize egress costs my moving more services into AWS. And this includes third-party services. In a competitive market, services like Crunchy Data, Pinecone, and Snowflake would ordinarily be hosted in their own datacenters or in colocation facilities, and customers would pay a hefty premium to use an AWS, Google or Azure version. But, since egress fees mean that a non-big-cloud variant can’t possibly be cost-effective for customers, these services don’t bother to offer. (And they can’t even be usefully competitive across clouds. If Azure wants to attract companies like Snowflake, reducing the amount they charge for storage and compute is entirely useless.)
I don’t know how to regulate this properly, but a price cap at some low (and ever-falling) figure wouldn’t be so horrible. Or requiring that egress be billed at the same rate as local traffic. (Although 100Gbps of same-rack traffic is cheap, whereas 100Gbps of egress is genuinely fairly expensive.)
As an aside: having recently priced Glacier vs commodity hardware, Glacier is reasonably priced for monthly storage but not particularly cheap. I suspect it exists in part to make customers feel better about moving large amounts of data into the cloud. AWS could likely still make a profit on it if the retrieval fee were decreased by a factor of 10. If I wanted to store a few hundred TB and access it a couple times a year, especially if that access is from outside AWS, then storing an on-prem copy is less expensive, and the best option may be an on-prem copy plus an archive in Glacier for disaster recovery.
How would you propose PAYG/SaaS bandwidth pricing is altered to be more competitive, or for example Amazon Glacier retrieval is heinously expensive for retrieval but it's transparent and IMO has a fair reflection of the underlying costs involved.