Price transparency can harm prices. Competitors can use it as a mechanism to signal appropriate prices to each other in order to reduce pressure to reduce prices. It's highly industry/context specific but transparent pricing does not always mean better pricing. In fact, in limited contexts, price fixing can lead to better pricing.
I think Westinghouse was the big FTC price-transparency-can-be-bad case.
That's orthogonal to the post's issue, though: he paid exactly the price he was quoted for services rendered; that he didn't understand the services he was consuming isn't really Amazon's problem but it's great they jumped in to help a $0 account (which, of course, was self-serving)...
Transparency to customers cannot be harmful in a free market. Nobody is asking for the full cost structure to be published.
Price fixing will only happen if there is no actual competition for customers, otherwise being the cheaper service is the easiest tool to increase your share of the market. Besides, isn’t that already the reality with prices being fixed in partnership with insurance providers?
Agreed. Pricing transparency in healthcare has been wonderful for pricing (see The Atlantic's Fallow's article).
My point was that pricing transparency is not a panacea. It seemed that some people were reacting as though pricing transparency is a magical salve.
AWS: In my experience, AWS pricing has been transparent and great and they generally take steps to keep you from foot-gunning yourself. This article discusses a case in which the author foot-guns himself using a predictable mechanism AWS can't really prevent. I'm unsure of what else AWS could do to protect him from himself... (Anyone can throw out simple solutions without understanding S3's implementation complexity: they could seriously throttle their own product! ... but that might be seriously complicated and might hamper the value of the product to others. Besides, if you buy a M1A1 tank, you should be very careful about using it: it could use tons of fuel... He bought an M1A1, left the keys on the dash and then was surprised when he found got a huge fuel bill...).
I think Westinghouse was the big FTC price-transparency-can-be-bad case.
That's orthogonal to the post's issue, though: he paid exactly the price he was quoted for services rendered; that he didn't understand the services he was consuming isn't really Amazon's problem but it's great they jumped in to help a $0 account (which, of course, was self-serving)...