Instead of launching the Google-network backbone as a premium upgrade, it was presented (bizarrely) as a standard network option downgrade.

That’s because network costs are as high as an arm and a leg at Google, and they are as high as giving them your first born at Amazon. ~$200 GB Transfer from GCP node to Google Cloud SQL, within their network, costs $33~. And that is in Eu, where bandwidth is cheap and available, and its even within the same region in Google Cloud.

By providing a downgrade, they are providing a cheaper and more reasonable option, so it is indeed an ‘upgrade’.

However both providers are getting away with highway robbery when it comes to charging for the network.

So much that if a notable provider who have perfected cheap or zero network costs with a good network — like Hetzner, for example — got in US market, they would wipe the floor with Amazon and Google when it comes to everything non-enterprise. Their dedicated servers come with unmetered 1 Gbit network cards, and their cloud nodes come with 20 TB transfer with each node, so much that it makes the traffic basically zero cost compared to the monthly price you are paying for the node.

Seriously, where is the value in the race to the bottom for cheaper virtual servers? Dammit, show us your cool toys!

The value in the race to the bottom for cheaper virtual servers and services is that there is a gigantic market there. Web hosts like WPEngine are able to charge $196 per month for entry level dedicated server equivalent virtual servers for WordPress hosting and customers are still content. That is likely one of the reasons why GC gives quite an importance to apps like WordPress and they have various official deployments, images which allows you to just deploy a WP instance on their cloud. WordPress constitutes ~35% of internet today.