Hacker News Reader

Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

> Netflix said it will review SK Broadband's claim, and seek dialogue and explore ways in the meantime to work with SK Broadband to ensure customers are not affected.

In other words, they will ship some Open Connect Appliance boxes to the ISP.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

And that’s nice for everyone.

Some think it’s unfair that big players like Netflix can do so. But I think them doing that is far far better than the idea of ISPs charging content providers for the bandwidth.

Like other said, the customers of the ISPs are already paying for the bandwidth. Having the ISPs charging Netflix for the bandwidth too, that’s no bueno.

View on HN

I just realized: By this same logic, end-users should be paid by advertisers for the bandwidth they were forced to consume for their ads.

I bet that wouldn't go over nearly as well as this.

End users generally don't pay for consuming extra bandwidth, so the injury isn't obvious.

SMS spam, though, had a very clear injury when you were charged for the privilege of receiving a message.

Ah but in a backwards twist my ISP now has a 1Tb per month data cap. You’d think this was huge, but I wanted to download all my games to a new Xbox…

That is a failure of Xbox in my opinion. Games are 100gb these days. Massive. My monthly bandwidth is line 400gb. That is pretty common in Canada. We can’t afford to download all the games, again. There should be a local transfer of games done over wifi. It should be made easy.

Uh, there is?[1]

[1]https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/console...

On mobile it's very common to have data caps, so end users do pay for the bandwidth used by ads indirectly.

Yeah, data caps was something common a few years ago...

Data caps are very common on phones, but even worse Comcast has implemented data limits across their services for home internet.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90580656/comcast-data-cap-remote...

I have a Google Fi phone and the data isn't capped, but it's $10 / GB.

Not quite. They have a soft 15 Gb cap, past which they throttle you down significantly but also don't charge you. And then it's $10 / Gb if you want to extend that cap.

There's more than one plan. The one I'm on is $10/GB until you use 6 GB (or $60). You're right though that they slow down after 15 GB (not Gb) but I've never come anywhere near that.

The way I look at it is that my plan is $20 then my data is $1 / 100 MB.

On a mobile connection you generally have a data cap, and you can switch to a more expensive plan for a higher cap. That's the same thing as paying for bandwidth, just that you are buying in bulk with pre-commitment.

To get significant damage as a single individual, take someone on a traditional satellite connection who can't get some important work done on time because ads put him above his data cap.

They are: the advertisers pays for the service users are consuming. The "free with advertising" business model is an efficient version of

Advertisers give money to users give money to content provider

Where money given to the users == money given to the content provider

> They are: the advertisers pays for the service users are consuming

and the users pay for the service the advertisers are consuming.

It's called currency for a reason... it likes to flow.

as long as it isn't downward

Then it would be called suction, maelstrom or waterfall, sometimes undertow.

This actually blew my mind, lol

Please explain how that logic fits in with the rest of this thread. It was your user agent running on your machine which requested the advertisement.

That is indeed an interesting point, especially for users who have metered Internet service.

Consider a user with a data cap of 1000GB, is metered as consuming say 1200GB of data, of which 200GB is Ads. The user is forced to pay extra for the 200GB to the ISP which the user should not have had to pay if there were no Ads.

Ignoring that ISPs should not meter the service, the above just doesn't seem right. The individual Internet services may be subsidized by Ads, but the user is paying to the ISP. So, in effect a user is paying, just to a different party.

Some lawyer should definitely look into it and see if there is potential for a class-action against Ad vendors.

Edit: I'm sure the flip argument would be that the user requested the Internet services that came with the Ad, so in effect the user is responsible for consuming the data. But that is where I think it becomes interesting and given that IMNAL I don't know what the legal minds think.

My question is why Open Connect Appliance wasn't even in their network in the first place?

I mean there are only a few ISP in every country. SK Broadband isn't small either it is something like 25% of market share. If I remember correctly Korean Telecom was 50% and LG was something like 15%. SK Telecom is also the largest MNO is South Korea. And if you are into hardware you may have at least heard of SK Hynix, world's third largest NAND manufacture.

Normally being a Korean conglomerate or Chaebol I would have thought SK must have some subsidiary competing with Netflix. But this doesn't seems to be the case here.

I wouldn't be surprised if the normal bandwidth is able to be handled by existing connections, rather than the boxes with the ISP's. Is netflix super popular in Korea?

>Is netflix super popular in Korea?

Netflix made a few big splash with content made specifically for South Korean. Or K-Drama. But I dont have any data to judge whether they are super popular or not.

> Is netflix super popular in Korea?

Yes, from the article:

> 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

Previously to Squid Game, I mean.

That too is true. As of March 2021, Netflix was the only over-the-top service that has reached 10M subscribers in SK (seconded by Wavve, currently operated by SKT and but only had ~4M subscribers at that time).

> My question is why Open Connect Appliance wasn't even in their network in the first place?

By having Open Connect Appliance network gives up ability to traffic engineer Netflix, which may decrease the leverage the network has with its peers or its transit providers.

Fundamentally, unless someone must peer with you (settlement or settlement free) and must peer with you on your terms ( locations, types of connections, etc ) you always want traffic that you and only you can control.

No matter what, SK Telecom is going to be eyeball (ingress) heavy and no amount of engineering of Netflix traffic is going to help with that, as it's all inbound anyway. Not that Netflix's upstreams like Level3 or Telia would be peering with SK Telecom anyway. Reducing the amount of Netflix traffic can only help.

Traffic engineering does not just cover what. It also covers where. At the eyeball network level where is way more important than what as what is constant.

> Normally being a Korean conglomerate or Chaebol I would have thought SK must have some subsidiary competing with Netflix. But this doesn't seems to be the case here.

Your guess is indeed correct! Two out of three major ISPs in South Korea operate their own OTT services (Wavve and Seezn). LG U+ is an exception and also the first major ISP to join the Open Connect Appliance program for the obvious reason.

Oh Thank You. Now it makes a bit more sense.

This is basically how the internet works though, isn't it? Your network and my network have parties interested in each others data. If parts of your network are generating traffic that I don't think is reasonable then I can either disable their access or negotiate with you or one of the parties on your network to pay more or I can deny or throttle access to the parties on my network. And a OCA box just makes everything better for everyone where it's possible to employ them.

"If parts of your network are generating traffic that I don't think is reasonable"

But it's your customers (the end users) generating traffic by watching content on my network (Netflix shows). If your customers can generate more traffic than you can handle, regardless of its a single entity or multiple entities, then that's a contract issue between you and your customers.

Exactly this. To say that Netflix is generating traffic pointed at SK broadband would not be fair. Those TCP connections are initiated by the end user. Without the user requests there would be no traffic.

So the philosophical question really becomes, what exactly is the end user buying from their ISP?

the physical access.

> the physical access.

Wouldn't that also include the bandwidth? Meaning, if the customer is already paying for the bandwidth they will consume, why wouldn't that cover bandwidth usage of Netflix content?

No. That's not what my contract with my ISP says I'm buying.

Besides, physical access alone is useless. Unless you're claiming that ISP's have been selling physical access but giving away usage for free? I don't know if that's the intent of your comment, but again it isn't how my ISP words the contract.

>Unless you're claiming that ISP's have been selling physical access but giving away usage for free?

I don't think zakki is too far off from the truth. Looking at Spectrum's Residential Internet Services Agreement, physical access might be what it boils down to. It's a little shocking they can have terms that make no guarantee to any amount of bandwidth at all, even on "their network". I suspect other large ISPs in the US use the same terminology.

>Subscriber understands and agrees that Spectrum does not guarantee that any particular amount of bandwidth on the Spectrum network or that any speed or throughput of Subscriber's connection to the Spectrum network will be available to Subscriber.

But I think you're correct. Having a physical connection does you no good if it isn't passing packets.

https://www.spectrum.com/policies/residential-internet-servi...

As a consumer I paid my ISP to carry say 50 Gb/s of data. They took my money on the understanding it's their job to carry that data for me. If I only wanted to browse text I wouldn't be paying for 50Gb/s. What did they think I was going to do?

You have... 50 Gb/s in your area?!

Oops, Mb/s.

They'd deliver text speeds then tell you to stop complaining because where else can you go while laughing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com