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Comment by growse | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little ignorant of the upcoming regs, but are they aiming to basically say "if a customer wants to leave a service, then the provider must provide them with all their data for free"?

I've not thought about the unintended consequences of this, but it feels like a reasonable regulation to have.

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Ingress and egress should be treated the same. Without any anti-competitive reasoning in mind a provider can’t claim that egress in particular should be more expensive than ingress. Even more so when ingress is many times completely free.

The asymmetry is obviously meant to trap customers, which is anti-competitive.

I'm pretty sure ingress started off costing less due to the nature of usage. If you were to see a graph of the usage you'd see ingress is used less. One reason is an http request takes less bytes than the response to the request. So the disparity in cost can't simple be attributed to a desire to trap customers

Wholesale connectivity is usually priced per unit for the 95th percentile sample, in the dominant direction. For most cloud services, outbound is the dominant direction by far. That's why ingress is free in almost every hosting environment.

Additionally, settlement free peering is usually based on having a roughly balanced traffic ratio (something like 2:1 or 3:1 counts as roughly balanced), attracting more ingress traffic by making it free vs having paid egress helps the provider balance their ratios so they may help their case for settlement free peering.

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