If online chatter is any indication, egress fees are the boogeyman of compute, the bane of competition. These fees have come under scrutiny from regulators the world over, not least of which because there’s often a charge to move data to a competitor or back into your own on-premises IT infrastructure. While providers vary in their data transfer pricing, egress occurs any time data is sent around the world, transferred to different parts of the cloud, pulled to an external location, or summoned by an external IP address. Egress fees, to the lament of regulators, are multiples more expensive among the largest three cloud service providers (CSP), the hyperscalers of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
But the panic makes a mountain out of a molehill. Egress fees distract from more earnest and harder to resolve industry issues, like interoperability, hyperscalers’ cross-market advantages, and inflated license fees for SaaS offerings on other providers’ platforms. Here, we outline a reproach of common regulatory proposals against egress fees, particularly those offered by the EU Data Act and the various European market studies that informed it.
