For what it's worth, Cloudfalre also pointed out the weird trend in Korean ISPs:
> South Korea is perhaps the only country in the world where bandwidth costs are going up. This may be driven by new regulations from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, which mandate the commercial terms of domestic interconnection, based on predetermined “Tiers” of participating networks. This is contrary to the model in most parts of the world, where networks self-regulate, and often peer without settlement. The government even prescribes the rate at which prices should decrease per year (-7.5%), which is significantly slower than the annual drop in unit bandwidth costs elsewhere in the world. We are only able to peer 2% of our traffic in South Korea. [1]
> Today, however, there are six expensive networks (HiNet, Korea Telecom, Optus, Telecom Argentina, Telefonica, Telstra) that are more than an order of magnitude more expensive than other bandwidth providers around the globe and refuse to discuss local peering relationships. [1]
This post is from 2016 and now the Korean Goverenment passes the law that makes the fee even higher. The Korean Government keeps favoring their ISP over other internet companies.
>>This post is from 2016 and now the Korean Goverenment passes the law that makes the fee even higher. The Korean Government keeps favoring their ISP over other internet companies.
The Korean Government also sees an opportunity to bring in additional revenue, while at the same time applying a more equal treatment to foreign and domestic content providers alike. Domestic content providers are paying network usage fees, and depending on the final thresholds (currently 1% of domestic network traffic and 1M daily users over a 3 month period[1]) content providers may also have to pay an additional surcharge. Naver, Kakao and other dominant Korean content providers aren't happy about this.[2]
It's a high stakes game for sure. I wonder how far South Korea will go to enforce this legislation; perhaps something similar to the Great Firewall of China. Theoretically, as/if popular foreign content providers are cut off (FB, Netflix, etc.) in the new year then domestic providers should grumble less as their market share and usage presumably increases.
I get the impression from reading this article that the proposed legislation would require websites to pay for bandwidth. Is this true? Because if so, it's absolutely insane - it would make DDoS attacks so much more effective by directly draining money from the target.
Every website already pays for bandwidth. Net neutrality is just a debate about which ISPs they should pay. As it turns out, every ISP wants a cut when someone's traffic goes through their network.
I wish ISPs would sort this out among themselves and send a unified bill to each of their own customers, instead of every website having to sign a contract with every ISP individually. Wait a second, they already do this. It's called peering and transit.
Edit: Come to think of it, if ISPs want to be paid when website traffic comes their way, websites should also demand to be paid when DDoS attacks from ISP networks come their way. That will teach ISPs to take better care of their own networks. :)
It's not my field of expertise, but I thought network peering worked both ways. So if a website like YouTube had a lot of content on its network then peering agreements could be such that in certain cases YouTube actually makes a small amount of money from the arrangement.
>>Undermining competition: Such a move would unfairly benefit large players, preventing smaller players who can’t pay these fees or shoulder equivalent obligations from competing against them. Limiting its application only to those content providers meeting certain thresholds of daily traffic volume or viewer numbers will not solve the problem as it deprives small players of opportunities to compete against the large ones.
Mozilla's open letter was issued in October, while the TBA revised regulations that were fleshed out in early September clarified that the thresholds for the additional content provider surcharges would trigger for content providers that account for "1 percent of domestic internet traffic and have more than 1 million daily users on average over a three-month period."[1]
The proposed amendment seems to favour smaller competitors and new entrants by increasing the regulatory burden for larger more successful content providers.
Unless I'm missing something, Mozilla might want to re-order their points and/or reword this first bullet.
> South Korea is perhaps the only country in the world where bandwidth costs are going up. This may be driven by new regulations from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, which mandate the commercial terms of domestic interconnection, based on predetermined “Tiers” of participating networks. This is contrary to the model in most parts of the world, where networks self-regulate, and often peer without settlement. The government even prescribes the rate at which prices should decrease per year (-7.5%), which is significantly slower than the annual drop in unit bandwidth costs elsewhere in the world. We are only able to peer 2% of our traffic in South Korea. [1]
> Today, however, there are six expensive networks (HiNet, Korea Telecom, Optus, Telecom Argentina, Telefonica, Telstra) that are more than an order of magnitude more expensive than other bandwidth providers around the globe and refuse to discuss local peering relationships. [1]
This post is from 2016 and now the Korean Goverenment passes the law that makes the fee even higher. The Korean Government keeps favoring their ISP over other internet companies.
[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world...