It’s because we as an industry decided to give in and submit to the cloud providers’ bullshit model of paying overpriced amounts for bandwidth while good old bare-metal providers still offer unmetered bandwidth for very reasonable prices.
Paying for your bandwidth and metal isn't a problem per-se as long as prices are reasonable (which they are with the old-school bare-metal providers). After all, those services do cost money to provide.
The problem happens when prices are extortionate (or the pricing model is predatory, ie pay per MB transferred instead of a flat rate per 1Gbps link) and relatively minor traffic translates to a major bill.
This particular issue is about 80 requests/second which is a drop in the bucket on a 1Gbps link. It would be basically unnoticeable if it wasn't for the cloud providers nickel & diming their customers.
You're still not getting it. I'm not arguing about whether it should be free or how much it should cost. I'm saying that when you have to pay for someone else's request, it's ripe for abuse. Instead, a system where the requester pays would be similar to how postage works in the US. Although I think it's highly unlikely that would make sense in a digital world.
