It's really awesome that Amazon was reasonable and refunded the charges because they were accidental. I mean, technically it was still your fault, so it would have been easy for them to be jerks about it.
Amazon did a nice thing, but the services were used. Asking to user to pay for those services (even if it was a mistake), would not have been a "jerk move"
And it makes good business sense besides. They can let the guy off and eat the probably less than a hundred or so bandwidth this guy actually cost them due to their upstream providers, get a good writeup and look better as a result,
..or kill his account, take him to collections, etc, etc, etc, (which would probably cost them more than $1K anyways), and lose a customer and get a PR black eye while they're at it.
So yeah, it would be a jerk move, and a pretty dumb one at that.
But in any case, even if in theory nothing is used, are you sure that Amazon doesn't have to pay for it too? Because then it's irrelevant whether it was really used or not.
Maybe it wouldn't be $1000, but it'd still be significantly more than $0.
Would probably even be easier to completely drop a bill as opposed to modifying it to charge a lesser amount.
Which would give Amazon more trouble? 1,000 TB spread out over a month, or 1,000 TB spread out over a day? Their current pricing model assumes both of these are equal, which they are plainly not.
Aside: Caps make the same mistake. If you have a 250GB cap, the ahem ISP charges the same whether you burn through that cap in a month or in a day.
Ever had a cell phone? During the day counts against an allotment, after a certain time at night, calls are free. For a home internet connection it would probably be reversed, as peak usage is right after work lets out.
Some power companies also do the same thing.
So this traffic must be almost as cheap as Amazon's own intra-territory exchange. Probably that's why they were being so nice. They probably are even somewhat happy to generate some more traffic directly for Google as the ratio is usually a leverage for the network guys.
But, surely, it's still very cool of them to drop the customer's bill.
I wonder, though, how was one ever to know that Google stripped their feedfetcher of even the basics of "intellect" and allowed one single spreadsheet to generate incoming 250 gigs hourly while not being open.
So, after all it's Amazon's and Google poor designs that hammered the guy and a common business sense for Amazon to let it go for the customer and just study the case together with Google.
Offering the refund was really nice. Asking to pay for the services would not have been a jerk move, because Amazon wasn't responsible for the extra costs either. I usually root for the little guy, but in this case, if anyone else might be expected to foot the bill, it should be Google for building a system that needlessly slurps 250GB/h without any apparent capping or rate-limiting, caused by a single spreadsheet. Just because Amazon S3 is huge and probably doesn't feel a thing doesn't mean it's a good idea, what if it were 500 spreadsheets doing this?
What if that FeederBot were to gorge itself onto one Google's own CDNs? Sure it's probably just a drop in the ocean for Google as well, but I bet they'd rather not experience this "minor inefficiency".