An update on Twitch in Korea

The ISPs are lobbying for this for years. They see that 90% of traffic is a handful of services like Netflix and co. and they feel entitled to charge those something.

You only need to convince a handful of bureaucrats of that idea.

The way you get all other legislation that doesn't get public spotlight: through lobbying, commission, and then present it as fait accompli to the Parliament amidst a hundred or so other laws.

First you slide language into a report saying that all players should fund internet infrastructure - then you try to get parliament to adopt language in a competition report saying they support access fees, without any hearings. Luckily some last minute lobbying derailed that.

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2023/06/when-media-gets-i...

The European Commission has been engaging in tons of bad-faith trickery around this, including ignoring BEREC (the EU's top telecom regulators), trying to slam it through without a consulation, downplaying all the negative comments in the consultation they were forced into having, and who knows what is next? Shoving it into a must pass bill?

Thierry Breton is a dangerous tech dinosaur who thinks that the future of Europe dominating tech is in Europe's ISPs. He thinks ISPs are the thing - when everyone knows that who you pay to get online is immaterial - it's what you do online that matters. He's deadset on figuring out how to make every big tech service in the world, from Google to AWS to Akamai to Cloudflare, pay EU ISPs.

Having a former telecom CEO at the head of the EU will be disastrous for the EU, and could be disastrous for the world generally.

If you connect two or more telecom lines into your rack or any service, you need to pay "Cross-Connect" fees. This is paid separately even if you brought your network line by your own. I can't say how much price is it since it is mostly trade secret with the sales dept of the telecom. but I'd say its a lot.

I don’t have data but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got there. India is mobile first, Jio is putting internet in the hands of 100s of millions of Indian at cheap prices. They’re shutting out the competitors.

Jio also has its own streaming service, which doesn’t count against your data caps. That’s anti net neutrality.

The obvious next step is to start making the sender pay for traffic as well.

Here's the proceeding on it: https://www.trai.gov.in/consultation-paper-regulatory-mechan...

Here's Jio's filing, claiming poverty:

https://www.trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/Reliance_JIO_Inf...

Here's my boss, the great Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick, rebutting Jio and more:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publicatio...

Are bandwidth fees just as high for any domestic Korean company creates a Twitch competitor?

Or do the 3 major telecoms operate their own streaming services, so only companies under their umbrella can afford a site like Twitch?

When I think of protectionism, I think of things like the agriculture and aerospace industries for the sake of food and national security. What is the strategic benefit of game streaming? Does loss of that industry represent an existential national threat??

Ironically, I only know of SK Telecom because I watched League of Legends tournaments on Twitch...

They do. You either pay Transit pricing or have settlement free peering (as in everyone pays his costs and the data exchange is free; as long as certain requirements are met).

Thing is: charging the data center/content provider above global average pricing and also charging the end customer for the same service again.

    All mobile phones have non-mutable shutter sounds.

Japan has similar legislation that came from men taking up-skirt photos in public places (trains, etc.). Workaround: Buy a phone overseas. It will still work on the Japan mobile networks. I assume Korea has a similar backstory. Please correct me if wrong.

    Location services like find my iPhone are banned.

I assume this is related to North Korean spying.

This wikipedia article[0] covers some of the history and ongoing issues with weird Korean technology policies, bizarre indeed.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...

> - You have to have a phone number to sign up for any type of account. (Hasn’t discouraged any toxicity either.)

While unfortunate, this is not required by the law. It is just that many Korean services abuse phone numbers to control users. A cultural problem, not a legislative one.

> - Most people own windows PCs because in order to do any banking in Korea you have to install software that is tantamount to the bank’s spyware on your computer.

Things have changed, and most banks support macOS too. Personally I don't mind them supporting anything, because smartphone bank apps work and it is more convenient than those of PC's.

> - All mobile phones have non-mutable shutter sounds.

It is not a legislation, but a voluntary restriction imposed by mobile carriers. I also hate it, but there's huge concerns among South Koreans regarding hidden cameras, and although I think those concerns are excessive and even paranoid, before the Korean people change their mind, the voluntary restriction won't go away.

> - Location services like find my iPhone are banned.

Only Apple's does not work. Samsung's and even Google's work.

> - cellular data usage costs an arm and a leg, making free WiFi a necessity at any business

I use an unlimited plan for 30 bucks a month in South Korea. I have no idea how much the carriers of other countries charge for an unlimited plan, but I don't think the current cost is too much.

> - contactless pay via Apple Pay was only introduced this past year

It was just because Apple and Korean credit card companies couldn't agree upon a fee. If legislation was the reason, why were there many contactlees pay services in South Korea before Apple Pay? Even China's UnionPay had been allowed in South Korea.

I assume you were angry because you could not use Apple's services in South Korea. Blame Apple's predatory strategy rather than South Korea, I guess.

And known for censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_South_K...

This is weird how in just 15 years Korea has turned from the most Internet-enabled country and into this backwards state.

That happened to Japan on even earlier timeframe and I wonder if China will follow that path - whether we are seeing the top Internet-enabled China right now (in fact, a few years back before they started cracking down on gaming)

So... the whole country sounds like a Samsung product.

> - You have to have a phone number to sign up for any type of account. (Hasn’t discouraged any toxicity either.)

It turns out that this is pretty much the case everywhere these days, doesn't seem to be exclusive to a particular country.

The non-mutable shutter sounds exist for a reason, a good reason at that. It's not an oppressive policy.

Requiring phone numbers to sign up or activate accounts is increasingly common outside Korea as well.

> You have to have a phone number to sign up for any type of account. (Hasn’t discouraged any toxicity either.)

Note that this isn't just confirming that you have *a* phone number. They check who actually owns the number by phoning the mobile service provider which is tied to the national ID (which encodes date of birth, sex and before 2020, place of birth registration). Online age verification in South Korea is therefore quite effective, since they check the actual age according to the phone subscription (and in turn national ID) rather than just a "please don't lie" button.

Before this it was even worse; they straight up requested the entire national ID (unchangable except after 2017 under very extreme data-leak circumstances, subjective to review) before it became illegal.

> Why not charge the end user?

The entire country is a single market, with 3 major cellular carriers and a handful of broadband carriers all competing for the same population. The competition is so cutthroat, they even publish monthly reports of which ISP stole how many customers from whom.

Obviously, no ISP wants to be the first to charge the end user more, or become known as the one that throttles YouTube, and risk losing hundreds of thousands of customers in an instant. Much easier to make the whole thing look like a business disagreement.

Note that it is always SK Broadband that whines the loudest about foreign video streaming platforms. Other ISPs like KT are sitting on bigger undersea cables, so they can afford to absorb much more bandwidth without resorting to reputation-destroying surcharges.

If I have to pay more to access one service than another, that's against the idea of net neutrality(making services equitably easy to access).

I don't understand how net neutrality applies in the opposite case though. If the hosting party is paying relative to their usage, how does that have anything to do with my access as an end user?

after some discussion with my friends I agree this seems to be the case

> Also, from what I understand, Twitch is marginal in Korea, since they have their own alternative streaming platforms.

This is incorrect, Twitch has been very popular in Korea.

Because transit is expensive due to peering fees that Korean ISPs charge? Net Neutrality rules in 2015 did govern peering (but not nearly as much as other aspects of the internet).

It's not transit. Transit is about taking your data across a network to some other network or networks. These are access fees aka termination fees demanded to deliver data to a networks own customers on net.

Net neutrality bans access fees as a kind of blocking and throttling.

Twitch's servers almost certainly directly connected with the three largest ISPs in Korea. And Korea has a regulation that requires them to pay those networks and it looks like the fees that were demanded were way too high. And that's what you get in an economic system where monopolists (ISPs have a terminating monopoly over there) are allowed to set prices.

Someone in Korea who wants the data twitch has, and pays their ISP for access to (among other things, twitch), can no longer access the data twitch has.

If the ISP is acting in the interests of its customers, it would make it as cheap as possible for twitch to send the data that its customers want.

If a business you are dealing with makes money some way other than by charging you for the service they provide, you're not their customer, you're their product.

Why are they outrageous? I've yet to see a reason that Netflix/twitch/etc. having to pay for the infrastructure they profit massively from is a bad thing.

If they have to pay a larger share, it means that services that don't use as much can be charged a much more reasonable rate.

Thanks. It doesn't immediately seem like charging the person sending traffic is a bad idea, as theoritically the costs should come out the same, so this seems like it's primarily an issue with regulatory capture. The article also mentions that Korea hasn't been investing in their infrastructure, but I find it hard to believe they're really that far behind every other country. Really sad that it seems like Korean users will be cut off from major platforms.

The comment about helping migrate streamers and their communities to another platform stood out to me in the OP. But presumably Korean streamers and viewers came to Twitch because they offer a superior service or reach or ad rate.

Do the Big 3 telecom providers have a at least somewhat comparable service to Twitch or is this more or less the end of some of these channels and communities people have spent a ton of effort to build?

In Korea, broadband consumers only pay for the size of the pipe (100Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, etc.) and not for transfer. It's been like this for the last 20+ years. Even mobile carriers have "unlimited" plans. Short of outright collusion, nobody would dare comes up with a different pricing structure. Everyone would flock to a competitor! Moreover, the population is shrinking. The ISPs have little hope of increasing revenue from the "pull" side, which probably explains why they keep trying to pile charges upon the "push" side.

There aren’t two sides to the argument… The ISP’s customer is paying to access that data, adding another fee to the originator of the data is double dipping, plain and simple.

I think it’s telling that generally the only network providers who can charge these fees are the ones with outsized market power - for example the largest ISPs in my country, such as Telstra and Optus don’t do any settlement free peering and charge everyone for transit to get bytes into their network. But the smaller ISP I’m on peers with Netflix and AWS and Microsoft and literally anyone who connects in to internet exchanges around the country, and funnily enough, even without charging content providers extra fees for data I’ve already paid for, my connection has better general performance, I pay a competitive fee compared to the other ISPs, and their network isn’t swamped by all the data…

I find it odd that twitch would rather shut down their service than simply stop offering a free tier. They already have an ad-free service called Twitch Turbo, surely enforcing usage in Korea wouldn't be prohibitively difficult. This makes me think that they are trying to spark outrage.

    Twitch is free, so it can’t do the same.

Twitch is an advertising platform first, and a streaming platform second, similar to Google search is a search portal second. They can reduce advert payout rates, which is similar to Netflix raising prices.

> The Korean government / ISPs justification for (effectively) removing net neutrality is that services such as Netflix/Twitch put an undue strain on the internet infrastructure that shouldn’t be borne by every user.

Netflix/Twitch don't put any "strain on the internet infrastructure" since they don't just gratuitously blast terabytes of UDP traffic to Korean IP addresses or something. The _users_ who paid of _internet access_ are using their connection to... access the Internet! And most popular internet services are obviously consuming significant amount of traffic. The ISPs can introduce bandwidth usage limits or try to actively throttle the connections to particular services, but they just prefer to double dip and milk the businesses instead. Strange that I have to explain such things on HN of all places...

> Service providers like anywhere, net neutrality be damned, run Deep Packet Inspection boxes that have no other purpose in life but to negotiate down your connections for whatever you do the ISP finds egregious.

Yeah, no.

Even Comcast stopped using DPI.

DPI is a scourge imposed mainly by US cell carriers on their customers. Wireline ISPs don’t need it.

Countries with working regulatory bodies do not have issues with DPI.

Instead, monopoly ISPs will run their peering links hot and force any content providers to buy paid peering directly.

> It's a terrible economic model that punishes peering.

Isn't that how most international trade agreements work? You either have to pay the taxes to manufacture in the country of origin, or you have to pay the import fees for importing it.

I don't understand what benefit I get as a consumer or small developer from not having models like this. If Netflix is generating 32b in revenue and using a significant amount of bandwidth, shouldnt they have to pay for a larger portion of the infrastructure?