Many of us are aware that ISPs charge less for bandwidth. But they are not offering the same thing as a tier 1 cloud provider.
You may find these interesting:
https://aws.amazon.com/video/watch/c37546e1558/
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/speed-scal...
Again, these egress fees are not paying for egress alone. They are defraying the cost of operating a massive, complicated, low-latency, reliable cloud network infrastructure, much of which is free of charge when used internally.
Some, like you, are expecting that cloud providers operate on a “cost plus” model where what you pay is strictly based on what marginal costs for the same thing. But it’s not that simple in reality. Charges levied for one thing can be used to pay for another.
If it's surplus it's not costs. Why did you claim that the high price is to cover the costs if 99.9% of it isn't covering the costs?
If I may take the opposite view: companies should be grateful to get any profit from me at all.
I edited my comment above to explain in more detail what these charges are covering (and it’s not egress bandwidth alone). This has been a fast moving conversation and I’ve tried to add more context, unfortunately after the fact. My bad for posting too quickly.
They could charge 10x-ish as much as T1 ISPs and cover all those costs and still have it be almost all profit.
Show us the math.
It's no different than if I'm selling apples for $1000 each. Even if I can find one or two customers willing to pay that, wouldn't I have to be pretty stupid to spend $900 growing each apple incompetently when I could just spend $2 at the grocery store to fulfil those orders?