Google LLC today said it will eliminate all data transfer fees for customers that want to migrate their data fully to other clouds.

The change, which applies globally, is effective immediately. Google said it’s the first major cloud provider to initiate such a policy change, which is aimed at ending what it called “restrictive licensing practices that lock in customers and warp competition.”

In a blog post announcing the policy change, Amit Zavery (pictured), general manager and head of platform at Google Cloud, said the move is part of the company’s commitment to simplify cloud interoperability. In September, Google announced that users of its Standard Tier, which uses the public internet rather than a private network for data transfer, will be eligible for 200 gigabytes of free internet data transfer every month.

Zavery said licensing restrictions imposed by other cloud makers drive up costs for companies that want to use multiple clouds and limit their ability to run their applications on preferred infrastructure. He linked to a report last year by Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe, a nonprofit trade association, that said restrictive licensing policies cost European customers billions of euros each year.

For example, the report cited a 2019 Microsoft Corp. policy change that ended users’ ability to deploy Office 365 licenses on third-party infrastructure. It said the change was part of “a wider set of commercial policies employed by legacy software vendors also offering cloud infrastructure services to exclude competitors and gain share.” Microsoft eased its terms last summer, in part because of EU pressure.

Regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority and the European Union’s European Commission have launched investigations into allegedly anticompetitive practices by cloud providers, citing restrictive software licenses and egress fees, which charge customers to retrieve their data from their cloud accounts.

Gartner Inc. Analyst Craig Lowery said the move is a bit of red herring because customers that cast their lots with a cloud provider are unlikely to leave for technical reasons. Egress fees were initiated when customers used cloud providers mainly to host virtual machines, which “aren’t very ‘sticky,'” he said in emailed comments.

“Nowadays, people use extremely sticky technologies like cloud-native services, and egress fees contribute little to a customer’s rationale for staying,” he said. “Eliminating them allows the provider to say they’re further empowering customers to leave if they so choose while knowing that it is unlikely due to technical lock-in.”

Nevertheless, Lowery called the move “a positive for customers and a differentiator if the provider is the only one not charging for egress.”

Google’s policy change doesn’t eliminate egress fees entirely. Free data transfer is available only to customers that migrate their entire Google Cloud workload to another cloud provider or an on-premises data center. Partial or occasional data transfers will still be covered by the complex data egress calculations that average out to between eight and 12 cents per terabyte.

Photo: SiliconANGLE