Google eliminates costs associated with data transfer from Cloud platform

Google Cloud has recently  enhanced they data flexibility practices in the industry. The company has decided to eliminate exit fees for customers who choose to transfer their data assets to competing platforms, marking a departure from the widely criticized practice of imposing prohibitive exit fees by some players in the market.

This announcement cuts across a range of Google Cloud services including Cloud Bigtable, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Filestore, Datastore, Persistent Disk, and Spanner. By ceasing to charge exit fees, Google Cloud aims to provide customers with more flexibility and options and fostering a more open and competitive cloud market.

The simplified process for customers involves submitting an exit approval request through a designated form and completing the data migration within a 60-day window. Notably, the data transfer fee will be waived through billing credit once the cloud-written agreement is terminated, subject to Google's right to audit data movement away from their platform.

This decision by Google Cloud comes in response to longstanding criticism from users and regulators regarding exit fees being perceived as coercive measures to retain customers. 

Traditionally influenced by factors such as data volume and the origin/destination of data, exit fees have often been substantial. For instance, notable companies like Apple have reportedly paid millions of dollars in exit fees to AWS for a single year of service.

It's worth noting that Google's actions aligns with its participation in the Bandwidth Alliance, a collective effort by companies committed to reducing or eliminating exit fees. This initiative revealed the evolving dynamics in the market influenced in part by regulatory scrutiny, including investigations by the U.K.’s CMA and the provisions of the EU’s Data Act. 

As the cloud industry undergoes these shifts, Google Cloud's proactive approach seeks to not only meet user expectations but also contribute to a more transparent and competitive cloud computing environment.