TLDR;
You pay for internet connectivity from your router, to the internet connection located inside your ISP. Azure doesn’t see any of that money. They also pay for a connection to the internet. and they pass that cost on to you.
Imagine an internet where all packets are delivered via a delivery company, such as Fedex. However, all packets can only be delivered to a central sorting office.
If you want your packets you have to pay a delivery company to pick them up from the sorting office and deliver them to your house. (or work, mountain lodge)
Now every company that wants to have an internet presence needs to have a delivery company that sends and receives their data. For the average website, that cost is reasonably trivial.
However, if you run a company like Netflix, that becomes a major part of your investment. Because shunting packets around isn’t cheap when you’ve got a lot of them to shunt. Assorted estimates around the web suggest that Netflix pays between tens and hundreds of millions of dollars for bandwidth.
Netflix pays for its data usage by charging its customers. Remember this is still only shunting packets to the central sorting office (the internet)
Amazon, Google, Azure (and other cloud providers) make money by economies of scale. Netflix exists on Amazon infrastructure, using Amazon servers and Amazon internet connectivity. Amazon, Google, and Azure all decided that instead of paying a delivery company to shunt packets to the sorting office, they’d do it themselves (this includes laying intercontinental undersea fibre)
By doing this, cloud providers get to keep all of the costs associated with transferring data in and out of their data centres.
You appear to be asking why doesn’t your delivery company charge include the costs of Azure shipping its data into the internet.
According to Cisco, in 2016 96 Exabytes of data were transferred across the public internet.
At some point, somebody has to pay for the traffic on the internet, the current model is that the people who send and receive the data from the internet. That means that you pay for the few GB of data your ISP provides you. and Netflix pay for the hundreds of terabytes they use, via AWS billing.
I am confident that if Netflix could pass on the cost of their data consumption directly on to end user ISP’s (whether or not they used Netflix) they would do that.
i’m equally sure that if Azure could simply bill ISPs for the data they use, they would happily do that. I’m equally sure you would be less happy paying your share of that 96 exabytes.
solved Internet service provider bandwidth vs Azure bandwidth [closed]