Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge

[Doug Barton <dougb () dougbarton us>]

On 10/1/21 7:45 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
> The reason Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, e.t.c., all built their 
> own global backbones is because of this nonsense that SK Broadband is 
> trying to pull with Netflix. At some point, the content folk will get 
> fed up, and go build it themselves. What an opportunity infrastructure 
> cost itself!

Except that Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all caved to SK's demands:

"The popularity of the hit series "Squid Game" and other offerings have 
underscored Netflix's status as the country's second-largest data 
traffic generator after Google's YouTube, but the two are the only ones 
to not pay network usage fees, which other content providers such as 
Amazon, Apple and Facebook are paying, SK said."

Which has emboldened SK to go after the bigger fish.

One incentive I haven't seen anyone mention is that ISPs don't want to 
charge customers what it really costs to provide them access. If you're 
the only one in your market that is doing that, no one is going to sign 
up because your pricing would be so far out of line with your competition.

Given that issue, I have some sympathy for eyeball networks wanting to 
charge content providers for the increased capacity that is needed to 
bring in their content. The cost would be passed on to the content 
provider's customers (in the same way that corporations don't pay taxes, 
their customers do), so the people on that ISP who are creating the 
increased demand would be (indirectly) paying for the increased 
capacity. That's actually fairer for the other customers who aren't 
Netflix subscribers.

The reason that Netflix doesn't want to do it is the same reason that 
ISPs don't want to charge their customers what it really costs to 
provide them access.