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Comment by sohn | Hacker News Reader

They wouldn't be jerks if they asked for the charges; you still generated the traffic and they had to pay for it.

Just as "legal" does not mean "ethical", "contractually permitted" does not mean "not a jerk move".

just like asking you to pay for the services you used is not a jerk move.

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"

Bandwidth pricing is a funny thing, in that it's only metered because it's convenient to do so. You haven't consumed any kind of finite resource by moving 1GB or 1000GB. There isn't any "use".

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.

You've consumed energy.

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.

Not $1,000 worth in either case.

Are you taking in account the time spent by the tech person(s) to read his email and process the rebates? People time is expensive, particularly if some manager needs to approve it.

Maybe it wouldn't be $1000, but it'd still be significantly more than $0.

We're not counting rebates yet - we're saying "This guy ran X amount of bandwidth through our system which we normally charge Y for" - how much did Amazon pay their upstream for that bandwidth and the billing (which is all completely automated)

That's my point: if you want them to charge less, the billing for this case is not automated (and is thus much more expensive).

I'd be flabbergasted to find out their billing system isn't at least as simple as their AWS console. 5 minutes of CSR work tops.

Would probably even be easier to completely drop a bill as opposed to modifying it to charge a lesser amount.

In the end, we are talking about a finite resource, because the Internet can only handle so much data transfer at one time. One way or another, your packets have to travel over physical infrastructure which, just like your home network, has a maximum capacity. Use of this infrastructure costs money; charging by bandwidth should help prevent users from "clogging the tubes" willy-nilly because there is a cost associated with excessive use.

Except most providers don't charge by time and demand (which would actually make sense), but by a fixed cap or fixed cost per byte. If the problem is congestion as you suggest, surely it would make more sense to charge different amounts based on time of day, length of session, etc?

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.

It is more complicated than that. Customer convenience must be considered. For instance, I and many others like me will not buy data transfer from someone when figuring the cost requires me to account for the time of day and phase of the moon.

Customers already deal with such billing from other companies and it's not difficult.

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.

Amazon was genuinely nice in this case. I had no expectation that they would refund the charges. It was a self-inflicted wound and Amazon had no obligation to pay for my own stupidity.

I'd expect Amazon and Google to peer directly within US territory, one being a major byte-generator and another one being the largest byte-sucker.

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.

Nor does failing "to be really nice" equal "jerk move".

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".

It's possible Google and Amazon have a peering arrangement so they may have paid little to nothing for the traffic.

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