The cost of egress plus a gateway or two is fairly close to the cost of burning a DVD twenty years ago. And it appears to actually be cheaper to burn DVDs and mail them today than to send data from a major cloud.

This becomes very relevant for things like archiving data. If you generate data outside of a major cloud, you can pay a major cloud a very reasonable fee to archive it for you. But if you ever download your archive, it will cost you about half the price of buying an external disk to store it on.

(To be fair, object storage is rather more reliable than a single crappy external drive. But if you access the data more than once, maybe you should have a colo or on-prem copy too.)