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Comment by rsingel | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the first service ever to be effectively shut down in a country by anti-net neutrality policies. This is the model know as sending party network pays (the same model that led to international telephone calls costing $5 a minute), and it has terrible incentives.

Unfortunately, Europe, Brazil and India are all looking to emulate Korea's requirement that online services pay ISPs.

It's particularly bad in the E.U. where Commissioner Thierry Breton, a former telecom CEO, wants to shove it through despite overwhelming opposition, including from the EU's top telecom regulators (BEREC).

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Native Korean here, It's way worse here. It has been a decade since former telecom board members in the chief of Korea Communications Commission, which should prevent this in the first place.

The Netflix trial back in 2021 beforehand was due to SK Broadband (South Korean ISP) having lots of NTT bound traffic since they didn't join the Netflix's OpenConnect Program while requesting Netflix to co-locate in their server main content servers in (the SK Broadband). The results? Netflix found guilty for causing those traffics.

For your information, You can't establish an ISP in South Korea since the law forbids anyone other than "3 major telecom"s (SK Broadband, KT, LG U+). Regulations protecting telecoms and making sure CPs getting properly ripped off (Bonus point if you are not domestic business).

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?

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

Yes, it is the same price. The biggest Korean streaming service, AfreecaTV, pays 1/3 of the total revenue.

So major real-time streaming services in Korea relies on peer-to-peer streaming to reduce the cost.

How effective peer-to-peer there? Is CGNAT widely deployed? Is IPv6 available to most people?

They were able to reduce the network price from $70m/yr to $12m/yr [1] (their revenue was around $220m/yr btw).

There is almost no IPv6 yet since we still have enough IPv4 addresses. I am not sure how it is implemented but p2p has been often used in Korean services since 20 years ago.

[1]: https://m.businesspost.co.kr/BP?command=mobile_view&num=2986...

> It's particularly bad in the E.U. where Commissioner Thierry Breton, a former telecom CEO, wants to shove it through despite overwhelming opposition, including from the EU's top telecom regulators (BEREC).

How would it then get through parliament?

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.

For the slide in thing, look at the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/94370

Chapter 2: c

We commit to: "developing adequate frameworks so that all market actors benefiting from the digital transformation assume their social responsibilities and make a fair and proportionate contribution to the costs of public goods, services and infrastructures, for the benefit of all people living in the EU."

Take that anodyne statement and then try to make it into online services paying ISPs in law. Call it fair share and point to this statement saying that everyone agreed to it.

Then try to shove that into a paragraph of a competition policy report to get legislators on the record supporting network fees without debate and hope no one notices. Claim victory even when the gambit fails because of a very clever amendment.

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

ISPs, their lobbyists, and their lawyers play the long game.

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.

You need to convince a decent chunk of Parliament, not just a handful.

No, only the pols in charge.

Well you need to convince someone in the Commission to raise the proposal (the easy part), and then you need to convince a majority of parties 300-350 people to vote in favour of the proposal in Parliament, and do the same in the council (member countries national leaders).

Came pretty close, actually: https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2023/06/when-media-gets-i...

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.

Can you link the sources for this. afaik India still has net neutrality and no bills tabled recently against this.

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...

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

Try https://www.trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/Reliance_Jio_Inf...

If not that, then https://www.trai.gov.in/consultation-paper-regulatory-mechan... and go to the last page of filings (p 21)

> Try https://www.trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/Reliance_Jio_Inf...

This one works. Took me embarrassingly long to figure out the difference is in the capitalization of "Jio".

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.

That's the exact game plan:

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

> Jio also has its own streaming service, which doesn’t count against your data caps.

How does this work? AFAIK JioCinema uses Akamai for content delivery... do they not count data for traffic from their own hosted edge caches or is it something else?

Can you point me to where Jio says it zero rates this? This is new to me and very interested

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.

Usual fees for cross-connect are low and one-time. It's charging for data into a network that cause the issue.

Transit yes; Deutsche Telekom AG is one of the worst in Europe. While telia charges something in the range of 10-20ct per Mbit; DTAG charges 80ct.

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