Btw. Hetzner charges 1.19 €/ TB or so if you exceed the 20 TB you get even with the 4.5 €/ month VM. So obviously, AWS is charging disproportionately compared to what it actually costs to deliver that bandwidth/ traffic.
These charges are great at preventing a good deal of piracy probably but they also prevent some startups from offering competitive prices or implement a simpler system.
Cost and price are at best correlated. Cost is at best a floor for pricing rarely the signal for it.
Bandwidth cost is very cheap for AWS and other major cloud vendor, even cheaper than likes of OVH, Hetzner buy at, because they also own good chunk of the deep sea cables in addition to DCs.
B/W specifically is charged high as a competitive moat. Every time I consider migration out of say S3, the migration costs always come out prohibitively high because of b/w pricing, so end up staying put.
That is exactly AWS wants, and so b/w is priced costliest in AWS ( even more so than Azure,GCP) because their market share is far ahead and thus have most risk of customer retention. Hetnzer and OVH have less PaaS service moat they have to worry about unlike AWS,Azure GCP , so they instead compete by setting rock bottom prices.
More market share AWS gains, less incentive they have to drop b/w pricing, only pressure to increase.