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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

IPv4 addresses have always had a cost (sort of, though they've gone from pennies per IP to $60+ per). I get the feeling Amazon was happy to eat the cost to reduce friction in deploying EC2 instances but now they've hit maximum saturation and now they can just add another charge to the pile that 99.99% of users will never notice.

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> I get the feeling Amazon was happy to eat the cost to reduce friction in deploying EC2 instances [...] and now they can just add another charge to the pile that 99.99% of users will never notice.

This always leaves me puzzled about the concept of "free markets." How can smaller entities compete when these massive conglomerates can perpetually introduce loss leaders or subsidize pricing in new sectors using profits from their existing businesses? This strategy effectively shields them and reduces competition.

My initial thought is that it should be illegal for companies to invest in sectors unrelated to where they generated their profits. However, I recognize this could lead to numerous unintended consequences.

So, what could be an alternative solution?

Predatory pricing is already illegal. Or at least was, but apparently SCOTUS weakened it substantially.

When was the last time antitrust laws were actually used in the US "against" these huge companies?

Not just huge companies! The entire venture capital model relies on providing a service substantially below cost and burning money to acquire users and eliminate competition so you can raise prices and profit later. In a sane world, Uber undercutting taxis with VC money should have been illegal.

Is it how it works in the EU? Has it worked well for them?

If the cost of initial operation were prohibited to be eaten by investment money, why the cost of development would not be, by the same logic?

I do think that there are cases of competition stifling through dumping, and that's illegal for a reason. Unfortunately, things are not as clearly delineated as with e.g. burning down your competitor's factory.

It's been a while. Wikipedia [1] is relatively useful here:

1890 - Start of conventional anti-trust enforcement

1930 - Ramp up of law's usage (under FDR)

1966 - First dissent against anti-trust (Brown Shoe Co. v. United States)

1974 - First decision against anti-trust (United States v. General Dynamics Corp.)

1982 - United States v. AT&T allows break up of Ma Bell. Weakened enforcement allows re-merger.

1999 - Microsoft successfully fights off anti-trust enforcement prevent company from ever being split.

If you want anti-trust enforcement, do not elect Reagan and his descendants.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

It happens all the time.

But usually it’s blocking mergers and acquisitions. Here’s an example: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/books/penguin-random-hous...

Waiting to break up a company for anti-trust is like waiting for your house to completely flood instead of fixing the pipe before it gets to that point.

> My initial thought is that it should be illegal for companies to invest in sectors unrelated to where they generated their profits. However, I recognize this could lead to numerous unintended consequences.

Main consequence would be forcing companies to go bankrupt, instead of pivoting to new areas, when their current market becomes obsolete/commoditized.

It’s a case by case basis. You can’t set a rule and say that every time an established leader eats a cost that it’s right or wrong.

In this case, AWS has had plenty of competition via other cloud services like Azure and Google Cloud as well as other hosting options. The fact that they ate this cost was immaterial and I don’t see any issue with it.

Even with all the competition, the alternatives still kind of pale in comparison so it’s definitely not a competition problem.

I'm not sure I agree with the premise of the question. Not charging for IPs was less likely to be some massive subsidization plan to create a loss leader and capture market and was more likely just what everyone else was doing - ignoring charging for the few pennies because the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and they've got better ways to spend time trying to make real money. Now prices are getting very high and that's no longer true.

Well since aws has been hugely profitable, you can easily argue it was simply priced in. I guess they did buy a lot of their ips when they were much cheaper, but it's similar to buying and holding land in many ways.

I had heard more than anything it was due to behind the scene implementations anyways, they likely finally resolved those.

This would be impossible to ban, and even small businesses do it. Imagine if the corner store charged you to park in the car park, charged you to stand in the store, charged you for every staff interaction, if you open the fridge they charge you a small amount for the power you consumed, etc.

IPv4 addressees were once as insignificant as any of these costs, now they aren't, so they are charging for it.

Speaking of IPv4 addresses, it's far more worse than "free markets". It's a rent seeking by internet early adopters (specifically the US). New indian ISP doesn't have much choice. IMO it's good thing because AWS users will waste less IPv4 addresses.

I run quite a few small production aws accounts for clients and this is a big increase to their bill. If you use a lot of t4g.nano instances, the IPs are more than the machines. I think the large customers that are 99% of the revenue won't care, but the bottom 50% of customers will notice.

Most customers will have very few public IPs. If your architecture is based around dozens (or even more) of public IPv4 addresses then you need to rethink your design because cost isn’t the only risk you’re exposing.

Hahahaha, you are giving the average AWS customer way too much credit.

I am pretty sure that the default VPC assigns public IPs (and a default route to the IGW) so if you grew organically without some kind of plan I can see many startups having tons of ephemeral addresses or EIPs.

Also I just did a cleanup recently myself of this and migrated an account to a hub/spoke security VPC with transit gateway. AWS makes it real pain for running instances to migrate to private IP only. You have to play games with adding a second NIC/EIP to workaround this.

AWS really need to deprecate the default VPC. Experienced engineers know to avoid it and novices are encouraged to design things badly because of it.

There should be a “wizard” type walkthrough to guide novices through creating their first VPC (they’d generally be managing AWS via “clickops” so a wizard type UI would work here).

You should try the latest VPC creation wizard. It collects all the required information and then creates what you need.

The biggest complaint I have with it is that it doesn’t write ID values to well known SSM parameters within the region.

I disagree. AWS should make it easier to just use routed IPv6, which makes the default VPC much more usable.

And then just use one of the zero-trust overlays to secure communications between nodes.

Now that you mention this, it's interesting for me to consider in retrospect. At least one prior employer had me architect solutions that were designed around scaling up using very small instances in large numbers during peak load.

In theory those are deployed in the private address space behind a load balancer, but getting any actual information on the production deployment was like pulling teeth.

I've seen a similar setup ~12 years ago: a very elastic setup on AWS following load changes.

At peak times, the clusters had substantially more than 1k API instances running together; none of the the API instances ever had a public address, and not for cost reasons.

Everything was on EC2, behind a bastion; you had to jump through two jump hosts to SSH to particular boxes (containers were not a thing yet). Everything ran on private networks. Everything was exposed through load balancers (HAProxy) via 2 or 3 public IPv4 addresses; I think one of them was only to interact with an off-AWS third-party service over the public internet.

Yes, it was a startup, just very technically-minded.

At AWS or in general? To my knowledge, existing assignments aren't incurring any annual fees (or if so, not more than IPv6).

There's just a secondary market for v4 these days, but that's also a one-time cost, as far as I know.

In other words, either AWS is charging a recurring fee for an asset they purchase at a one-time flat fee (which is great if you use a service for less than the year or so it takes to amortize, and not so much afterwards), or I missed a development in the IPv4 exhaustion saga.

I assume it’s a one time fee for AWS and pay forever for all of us that can’t afford to buy a block.

I thought it was closer to $40 per IP last time I looked. AWS charging $3.60 per month looks pretty lucrative either way since the payback is only 1-1.5 years.

We recently bought a /24 at $65 per IP. Larger blocks are somewhat cheaper, but not by much.

You mean like my landlord?

If you're renting property at a rate that would amortize after 12 months if you'd purchase instead, I suggest you do that – it shouldn't be hard to find a one-year mortgage ;)

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