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

[Geoff Huston <gih () apnic net>]

> On 11 Oct 2021, at 6:33 am, Matthew Petach <mpetach () netflight com> wrote:
>
> […] Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all caved to SK's demands:
>
> I will note that my $previous_employer was a top-10 web content provider 
> that did *not* pay SK Broadband.  Not all the content providers caved 
> to SKB.


The situation in South Korea between content providers and broadband providers has a long history. Back in early 2012 
Korea Telecom implemented a block on Samsung’s “smart TV” models because they had a streaming high def content service 
that KT claimed that was saturating their broadband network. According to KT, Samsung opted to take a "very negative 
response" to KT's actions. Samsung obtained a court injunction to lift KT's block on their TVs and an associated court 
order for KT and Samsung to enter into arbitration. At the same time Samsung filed a lawsuit against KT. In due course 
the temperature of the dispute abated and all the parties backed down. KT discontinued its block, and Samsung dropped 
its lawsuit. However, there was evidently some residual bad feeling here as Samsung expressed their desire for the 
national regulator to convey a "strict warning" to KT over its actions.

You have to wonder if the major difference some nine years later is that while Samsung is a Korean business, Netflix is 
a ‘foreign’ entity, and perhaps the broadband ISPs feel that the Korean legal actions in this round will have a 
different outcome and favour the local ISP enterprises over the foreign streamer.

I have to agree with Doug Barton's earlier observation is that the base problem is that the ISPs are using a flawed 
business model and they don't want to charge their customers what it really costs to provide them with high speed 
access, nor do they want to fund additional back-end capacity in their network without some form of offset revenue 
stream.

Geoff