Weird, one would expect that in anything related to technology either prices go down, or performance goes up over time.
That's usually true if you see the actual costs of the thing.
In the case of data transmission if you were using some data transmission system where you were charged per byte based on the operator's costs (possibly time dependent so the cost per byte might vary depending on the amount of traffic on the provider's network and on the varying real time prices of the networks they connect to) then you would indeed see prices going down over time and performance going up.
Consumers, small businesses, and often even medium businesses generally hate that kind of pricing. They like fixed monthly bills. So providers offer that, setting the amount of data included in that price high enough that most customers won't ever come near it.
That tends to result in the lower bandwidth users actually paying quite a bit more than they would if they had per byte pricing and the higher bandwidth (but not so high as to go over the included data and hit overage fees) paying less than they would under the per byte model.
That can attract more high bandwidth customers and eventually the model of customer bandwidth usage that was used to set the price and bandwidth allowance is no longer accurate and gets adjusted.
Note that this means that price you pay is not just a function of the underlying technology costs--it is also a function of how other people are using the service.
Same thing happens even in non-technology areas. You probably wouldn't go into a fixed price "all you can eat" restaurant just to get a donut and cup of coffee. The fixed price is set to cover people getting full meals. And if a bunch of competitive eaters started coming in every day to do their training at that restaurant you can safely bet that the price is going to go up for everyone or there is going to be an asterisk added to "all you can eat" with a footnote that puts some sort of cap on it.
True, so what gives? Just them wanting more money now that they got enough customers? They probably did some calculations and realized that damn, they could pocket more money so might as well try their luck. Like yeah, let us assume they have 10k customers: 7.05 * 10000 is 70500, 8.99 * 10000 is 89900, that is 19400 USD more for them, and that is just for one!
Or the cause is one step removed, for example the handful of giant companies that control all US internet infrastructure, versus the hundreds all over Europe.
Yeah, so that probably means the count of users is higher than the previously assumed 10k. They can do it, so they will do it.
Not when there is a duopoly on one market (US) and hundreds of companies on other (EU).
This case is for a EU company's offerings to the US. Why would they make themselves less competitive?
How is there a duopoly in the cloud market in the US?
It's not accurate at all. There are far more high tier cloud offerings in the US than in Europe.
Europe has nothing like AWS + Google + Azure + Oracle. Then you can add in a dozen mid tier companies like DigitalOcean.
They also have nothing like Cloudflare and dozens of other large cloud services companies. Europe has a cloud so basic and primitive you'd think they were a developing economic region still struggling to grasp basic software development.
Do you know that AWS uses other companies data centers in many places in the EU?
> They also have nothing like Cloudflare and dozens of other large cloud services companies. Europe has a cloud so basic and primitive you'd think they were a developing economic region still struggling to grasp basic software development.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
If you think Europe, which has United Internet(Ionos), OVH, scaleway, and many others is a developing region, you have never seen the hosting market in an actually developing market.