Technology

I would hope to see cloud service providers fall more under a utility type of regulation

I'm just concerned about how this all plays out.

With internet, I totally agree a since it's an incredibly simple operation, relatively speaking. At the end of the day, it's bandwidth, latency, stability, and maybe a few features on top, which makes it really simple to standardize, just like with electricity or water.

However, cloud hosting has a lot of moving parts:

• hardware generation - very few people only care about compute capacity, they care about architecture (ARM, x86, RISC-V, etc), CPU capabilities (SSE, cryptography support, etc), latency between nodes, etc
• abstractions/add-on features - S3, storage blocks, k8s, lambdas, DDOS protection, etc
• policies - allowed services, bandwidth limits, etc

There are a ton of reasons to choose one provider over another.

If we instead treat it as a utility, we'll remove a lot of the differentiation and companies will instead compete purely on margins, as in, who can offer the cheapest, crappiest product that technically meets the requirements. When you can no longer compete on features, you compete on service and margins.

I'm not happy with how dominant AWS is, but that's what first mover advantage does. Yes, they weren't the first to create cloud services, but they were the first to create a one-stop shop of services companies want. That opens up opportunities for lock-in, but it also preserves competition for smaller companies to take the market segments that don't need all those features.

But I prefer their open market and transparent, if complicated, pricing to trying to work though a deal with a dozen different other software platform vendors all trying to close business and screw over our clients

And that's their core competency: vertical integration. A lot of businesses prefer to be screwed by one vendor instead of several.

I get it.

That said, I think cloud services are starting to settle down. S3 style storage has largely won the war, and now everyone and their dog has an S3-compatible storage engine, which keeps AWS a bit more honest on its pricing. The same will happen with other AWS features, meaning their first mover advantage will be less impactful going forward as competitors catch up.

Even their sales people are pretty well incentivize to drive service consumption rather than promote lock in

That's what lock-in is, it's just a softer form than things like egress costs. They want you to use AWS services everywhere, which makes switching to a competitor more difficult. AWS' model is more palatable than others', but it's still a form of lock-in.