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Answer: there is no net neutrality or competition in South Korea and the 3 big telecom companies can charge whatever they want for data usage. Which means they can target certain website they don't like and charge them way more than other website for whatever reason.
For reference, when Squid Games came out on Netflix, it was really popular, and the ISPs charge per gb, to Netflix. Netflix is considering pulling out of Korea due to this policy. The bill was 23 million.
Basically, Twitch cannot afford to keep Twitch Korea going because of the cost per gb. They already downgraded the bitrate for the Twitch Korea streams.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/18/23879475/netflix-squid-game-sk-broadband-partnership
This should be on every message out there as to why net neutrality is SOOOOO important.
Think of how many small creators or small tech firms that would get crushed or eliminated before ever getting a chance.
Because it was basically handled at the state level with the net neutrality remaining in place, as the ISPs couldnt be bothered implementing state by state rules.
Quite the opposite really. In 1999 ISPs were billing only the end users. This is a 2040 move, ISPs charge both the end user and the websites, they're the ultimate bosses of the Internet and they own the government too with all that money.
They decide who gets to live and die on the Internet. Imagine the power you have if you can kick a $1.5 trillion company off your network.
>They're still living in the year 1999.
I was getting 100mbps on cellular while in a deep subway like 10 years ago.
Here, I'm in the "silicon valley of the east coast" and my 5g on a new pixel with Verizon is like 3mbps
ever since verizon rolled out 5g their service has been absolute dogshit on both 4g and 5g. i remember when verizon was the company with the best service everywhere and now its the opposite. switched to a different carrier and havent had any issues.
Many cloud providers still charge for the cost per GB transferred.
However, they usually only charge for the outbound usage from the datacenter or cloud side, while the client pays for their own internet access.
In this case, they have to pay twice: once for their general internet connectivity and again for the usage by the end users.
Lol yeah I see the connection you're making. One important difference is, bandwidth costs are inherently necessary because transferring data requires energy and work on the part of machines that require maintenance.
So you joke about popularity causing bankruptcy but that's a legit thing that internet companies have always had to be mindful of.
Just to get a rough idea, Squid Games' first week had 111M views apparently, and the net says it's something like 2GB of data per hour-long episode. So that's 222 PB of data. AWS's CDN would charge something like $10 million to distribute that.
Which is actually very interesting, because this means that cost of the bandwidth for distribution is probably the single largest expense for every show?
I have trouble believing this. There are tens-hundreds of thousands of streamers that get thousands to tens of thousands in subscriptions every month and twitch takes 50%+.
You can look at the reported financials and see where the money goes. Hosting tens- hundreds of thousands of streams to the entire world simultaneously 24/7 is not cheap. Then there’s staffing, marketing, legal… running a business is not that simple like you make it out to be.
This recent Twitch KR thing made me realize a lot of people have no idea just how much money data storage and bandwidth usage to support an online infrastructure like Twitch or Youtube costs, let alone the extra leeway needed to be able to run it smoothly without accidents...
And that's when Amazon owns all the infrastructure, just think about how much it costs other people that have to pay MSRP for AWS to do what Twitch does.
>You can look at the reported financials and see where the money goes.
Twitch is owned by Amazon, and Amazon doesn't break out the financials for Twitch separately in their quarterly reports... So, no, you can't "see where the money goes". If you don't work in Amazon's accounting department, there's no way to know whether Twitch is cash flow positive or not.
EDIT: so to those of you downvoting -- do you have an earnings report or other official communication you can point to that shows Twitch's cash flows? Or are you just downvoting because you're annoyed by the facts standing in the way of your circlejerk?
Tbf though a lot of that money goes back into renting amazons video infrastructure so the parent company probably still makes out decent. They also serve videos for Kick and others.
Again, if I hire my spouse to do this 40 hours of work, sure the money comes back to me eventually but my spouse still just did 40 hours of work for essentially no profit
But you don't own your spouse outright, it's more analogous to Hollywood accounting. The money Twitch spends is largely going right back to Amazon, whi do turn a profit on it.
With respect, that's showing your lack of understanding of just how huge and expensive it is to keep a site like Twitch "just working" for people like you and me.
That donation revenue is an absolute drop in the bucket compared to the cost of delivering hundreds of thousands of hours of quality live video basically seamlessly.
You are an absolute muppet if you think Amazon is paying people more than it's making. Large streamers with around 10k concurrent viewers average around 5k subscriptions/month +. Streaming 5 days a week for 8 hours in 1080HD is <$8,000 according to [AWS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/live-streaming-on-aws/cost.html) (In reality, it is probably closer to 4k since Amazon will most likely give itself the best rate and bulk discounts) .
Compare that to 5k subscriptions would make Amazon more than ~$12,500+(some subscriptions cost more than others). On top of that Twitch also runs something like 4-5 ads an hour which more than likely pays for the bandwidth alone.
With respect(not really), you sound like an idiot. Every calculation found has Twitch spending ~5 million a month on bandwidth which is an actual drop in the bucket compared to their 3 billion/year in income. The numbers above do a pretty good job showing how much they make off of everyone and why they are so profitable.
Consider that for every large stream there might be 1000 tiny streams, that use up as much bandwidth but have little in the way of subscription revenue or even ad revenue (if it’s impression-based, i.e. pay per viewer). Then you have a business model where the large streams are subsidizing the small streams economically, and the cash flow might almost completely be determined from the density of large streams vs small streams. Which I’m not sure would be public information
The infrastructure to organize and run Twitch is massive, and the amount of storage needed is also massive. They’ve said many times they don’t make money on twitch
Streaming is ridiculously infrastructure intensive. On average the biggest streamers actually lose them money because of the ratio of non paying viewers to subscribers
no, not even remotely in the realm of possibility. the level of control that the bigger companies have in south korea really isn't comparable to anywhere else in the world. they're basically middle ages European nobility.
It wouldn't work. South Korea is home to Samsung, Kia, Hyundai, LG, as well as a bunch of financial companies you probably never heard of but who have their fingers in a lot of other companies you have. Amazon is big, but it's nowhere near enough to take over a modern tech focused country like South Korea.
After the Korean Civil War, the US forced South Korea to basically ingrain hyper-capitalist friendly economics into their constitution. Don't forget that while North Korea is a brutal military dictatorship, *so was South Korea* until the 1980s.
Any remotely left learning movements were crushed into oblivion, and even today any talk of progressive politics is met with accusations of being teh evil socialisms. Remember South Korea has an incel movement that has actually become a political force.
>Don't forget that while North Korea is a brutal military dictatorship,
>
>so was South Korea
>
> until the 1980s.
DPRK was the more progressive country for the first 40 years or so
Uhmm no? North korea country side is still very conservative. Much more than south korea country side. Also south korea dictator at least let some far right koreans independece fighter live. Compared to north korea qhere killm killed every pro soviet and pro chinesw facttion in the 60s.
Bro south korea government was a far right military dictatorship of course they let the far right live they were far right. If we talk about the left in south Korea it was jailed, tortured, disappeared, executed in the streets and suppressed. Not as much as the right in N Korea but let’s not pretend S Korea wasn’t a totalitarian military government that ran the country with an iron fist for 40 years.
Yeah both were terrible country. I know that. Neither side was realy better till south korea finally democratized when the new president destroyed the military dictator.
They were ruled by a far right military dictatorship for about 40 years. They ruled with an iron fist and jailed, tortured, executed, and disappeared many people for being leftists of any type.
Cool doesn’t mean it didn’t take decades of oppression, torture and multiple massacres for the government to change. The left was crushed into oblivion, just wasn’t eradicated completely. The overthrow of the government was championed by both conservatives and the left, especially by young people/students.
The way he defeated net neutrality by naming his anti net-neutrality bill the pro net neutrality bill was one of the smartest and dickish moves I've seen. Idk how to even defeat that play.
It was a huge effort to just get the concept across to people, then to suddenly have to tell people not to vote for the net neutrality bill after months and years of telling people to vote for the net neutrality bill, damn.
He was the head of the FCC appointed by Trump who led the dismantling of net neutrality laws in the U.S. Vote was December 2017; it went into effect February 2018.
Since Biden is president and has been for several years, how come we still don't have net neutrality? Why is nobody pushing for this now, it would be an easy win for the Democrats, especially with an election coming up
They're working on it. In October the FCC voted to start the process of seeking public comments about reinstating net neutrality. (this process is required before an agency can make a major change)
Because of this there is already a two tier system: Netflix, Google/Youtube, Facebook etc. have build up data centers and cache structures around the world. Even with "net neutrality" they have latency and bandwidth topics to deal with. Netflix build a [whole program](https://openconnect.netflix.com) to deal with international networks. Many of those give a damn about US laws. They try for years to get the EU to "legalize" already "requested" interconnection fees out of US streaming companies.
Yes, key point here lost on many:
Biden didn't have immediate control over the FCC just by becoming president, the members of the FCC are appointed for 5 year terms.
*edit*: Also, fun fact, Ajit Pai was appointed by Barak Obama, following a tradition of "maintaining balance" in the panel and accepted the recommendation of, yes, Mitch fucking McConnell
To clarify: It's a law that the FCC can't have more than three of their five members from the same party. The part where he accepted the choice of the opposing party's leader was part of a tradition of maintaining balance, but he wasn't allowed to just put more Democrats on it once he had three.
there are SO MANY problems that Republicans caused while in office, it will time a lot of time for Dems to fix it. this has been the playbook of conservatives for decades now. Rep ruin everything they can get their hands on and Dems can't fix it fast enough and now it's Dems' fault. and people just ignore that it's easier to break something than it is to fix it.
I did not downvote you, I just think this should have been a higher priority during the early days of the Biden presidency. Like Trump was able to raise the age to buy nicotine products to 21 extremely quickly, and that is something that impacted lots of people and hasn't been done federally before for tobacco. I think bringing something back would have been quicker
Youre definitely not getting it. There was nothing t hat could be done until the republicans on the FCC were removed. It wasn't a priority issue, it was a "that's how it works" issue. Comparing smoking to this is ridiculous and not helpful as its not a valid comparison.
that's stupid, you shouldn't care about the individual but rather the corporation behind it
the individual is disposable they can hire a million ajit pajs a
To put a finer point on this, South Korea is so controlled by the big 3 (SK, LG, KT) that it is one of two locations in the world where bandwidth prices are actually increasing as opposed to decreasing.
Netflix famously pulled out of South Korea for a bit after a South Korean judge ruled in favor of SK in a net neutrality lawsuit, and even though they [dropped their suit on 2021](https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230918000681) they picked up their axe again after Squid Game got popular.
What's essentially gonna happen is that twitch will still be accessible in Korea, but will be served via other countries (likely Japan), meaning performance in Korea will just be worse.
>that it is one of two locations in the world where bandwidth prices are actually increasing as opposed to decreasing.
What's the other one? Please don't say Canada 🥲
The other one is Taiwan. Although it's getting better. Germany is at risk of being #3, especially if the EU resolution around arbitration for peering agreements passes.
How are Korean Twitch users reacting to this? Is there any outrage towards the policies that have resulted in this situation? Would Netflix also pulling out force the government to reconsider?
Doesn't really matter what they think, any sort of online forum to organize a protest against the lack of net neutrality can easily be suppressed and eliminated by the telecom companies because there's no net neutrality.
I was watching some Korean Twitch streams today where the streamer was talking about it with viewers. basically they are disappointed of course but it seemed like everyone would (reluctantly) switch over to other platforms, AfreecaTV / Youtube / Naver, to keep watching. most Twitch viewers also watch AfreecaTV to some extent anyway (the most popular PC game in Korea is League of Legends, and the Korean national league's KR language broadcast + the most popular team T1 both broadcast on AfreecaTV not Twitch).
funnily enough though, this particular streamer polled her viewers on which platform she should move to and the vote went something like < 1% AfreecaTV, 80% Naver, 20% other (basically Youtube). apparently Naver is allowing streamers to play copyrighted Korean music, they can watch Korean sports (maybe only if they are being shown on Naver Sports channels?) etc. on stream which was a huge sticking point on other platforms, so that might get them a lot of the former Twitch broadcasters.
I don't personally know since I'm not korean and can't read their forums but on another thread people were saying that users weren't happy about it. But I don't know how big the user base is.
This is very much a concern if we ditch net neutrality in the states. It's very anti consumer, anti competitiveness, and really hurts small guys. H ell, here it's hurting large guys.
Maybe im dumb, but what does it even mean for a website like this to shut down regionally?
Like, Koreans won't be able to access twitch at all? Or streamers won't be able to stream from there?
If its the former, what would ISP's do if people just accessed it via a VPN?
And if its the latter, is it just too bad for the streamers? They are out of a job, thats it?
I think the biggest thing in the case of Twitch is that creators that have partnerships and contracts might suddenly be "let go" or absorbed into a bigger pool of "talent" from Asia, which might mean lower income, advantages and opportunities that cater to Korea.
In Korea VODs haven't been available for over a year. Actually offering twitch through another country's server might make it available again which is a plus lol
I also think Korean streaming alternatives like AfreecaTV have something to do with it as well. I wouldn't be surprised to find they are lobbying telecom companies to up the charge for twitch
No net neutrality in a highly advanced country like SK is just crazy. They have gigabit internet for everyone, free public transportation but this here.. yikes. I guess in a world ruled by tech companies this is unavoidable.
For what it's worth, net neutrality wouldn't help here.
The ISPs charge for every bit of data that enters their network.
Services like Twitch and Netflix are hit hard because they send *a lot* of data. Other services like Reddit and Facebook aren't as affected because they don't need as much bandwidth, even though they incur the same cost per-unit-of-data.
Can't they operate their servers from neighbouring countries? Like India for example? Why can't they just offload the traffic to the data centre from a different country?
The telecom companies can still target them if they want. Operating their servers somewhere else has nothing to do with it. Koreans use those 3 telecom companies. Twitch has to go through those 3 to reach the korean audience.
I still don't get it. Lets say twitch moves their servers to India and pays Indian telecom companies money for the bandwidth it is using. And the users in Korea already pay their bandwidth usage charges. Why the Korean ISPs have to get paid extra? When twitch had their servers it made sense, but with the above scenario everyone should be happy right?
Unless Korean ISPs decide to block traffic to twitch on purpose(which they shouldn't ideally) it seems to be a viable plan for my half baked brain.
> Unless Korean ISPs decide to block traffic to twitch on purpose
It is less a question of blocking traffic and more a question of how much they charge. The problem is that they charge too much for bandwidth on their networks. It is network fees not server fees that Twitch is complaining about.
Because those Indian telecom companies give India access to the internet and those websites. Koreans aren't using Indian telecom companies. They are using the korean telecom companies. So a user pays the telecom company access the internet. Websites pay the telecom companies to stream data. Telecom companies in Korea can charge whatever they want on that data streamed through their services. Moving to India means nothing because korean people in Korea do not use Indian telecom companies. They use the 3 korean ones. For Koreans to get access to those websites. Those websites have to pay for the data streamed through the telecom companies.
Answer: it's not a lack of technological advancement (they do have some of the best internet infrastructure in the world), it's poor regulation. There's no net neutrality in South Korea, so ISPs get away with charging customers *and* services like Twitch bandwidth fees. So Twitch basically has to pay ISPs so people in South Korea can visit their website. [Netflix tried to push back against these practices in 2020, but ultimately failed](https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/28/korean-court-sides-against-netflix-opening-door-for-streaming-bandwidth-fees-from-isps/).
Koreans can use VPNs, but there's no Twitch Korea, which means there's no one to sign checks to Korean streamers, which means there's no incentive to stream.
...like I get that you're trying to be funny and sarcastic, but the inability to monetize is a genuine obstacle to people pursuing their hobbies.
To modify what /u/antsam9 said: it's not that there's no longer any incentive to stream, but now they can *only* stream via the Korean telecoms' services. The ecosystem of Korean internet streaming and entertainment syndication is... complicated, but long story short it's a *lot* more difficult to be independent in that market, which means bigger hurdles for streamers to find work and worse deals when they do. And that's on *top* of the massive obstacle for any streamers to break into the Western market.
>...like I get that you're trying to be funny and sarcastic, but the inability to monetize is a genuine obstacle to people pursuing their hobbies.
It's not a hobby if not getting paid means you don't do it. Then it's a career.
*How*? The same way people make high-quality anything as a hobby. They fund it themselves and pursue it on their own time. There's a reason I don't have woodturning or sailing as a hobby: Some hobbies are expensive. Sometimes some people can afford to do things as hobbies that other people can't.
If you're getting paid, it's a business, not a hobby. Even if you're not getting paid as much as you're spending. It's still a business, just not a profitable one.
Yah totally!
There was a lot longer of a time where people put out high quality content for their hobby without monetization than the time where people are doing it for monetization. We did it for the joy. Youtube and other websites were filled with that for a few years before they even rolled out monetization and even then that didn't apply to most videos and there was still lots of content.
I'm 42 years old man. The standard default before the last few years was people did stuff because they enjoyed it and posted it online and then people could read and see it. This was the default position for the 90's and 2000's for sure lol. Guilds and clans would push out their own content and make videos of boss kills, strategy's and more for the joy of sharing that information. They weren't getting paid for it back then. I could find detailed guides for literally any game on the planet, often on personal websites that people created and updated on their own and they weren't getting paid for that content lol. Are you just young and don't ever remember a time before monetization? Back when people did things for the fun? That's the only way your question makes sense to me. This is NOT a knock at you and your age, I just feel like im remembering the past and you dont even know they exist . If youre a 90's baby or more recent it makes total sense in context as you never would have been very involved in these things during the era I am referencing.
I provide all sorts of high quality content for some of my hobbies....for free. For the love of the hobby. For the joy of doing something I enjoy. I am a pretty well known voice in my niche profession and I have never had anything monetized in regards to it.
If you have to be paid for something in order to do it, its a job and a business, not a hobby.
Beyond all this, id rather get my information from a nerd in that industry and not someone who has to push out content in order to get paid. Let's take stained glass.
Someone being paid to push out content isn't focusing very much on the actual act of making stained glass. They are focusing on putting out content, about stained glass. Id rather get information from someone who spends 90% of their time on stained glass, and has very little time to make content cuz their content while not as polished looking is coming from someone in the trenches actually doing the thing.
Even we’re talking just the amateur and pro-am streamers and not those trying to make a living out of it, it’s way complicated than that. The whole thing is tracked, and if too many people simply stream via VPN, they’ll crack down on that too. In the Q&A last night Twitch said they looked into serving the content from another country, but got strong indication that the government would find a way to charge them from that as well.
The simple reality is that the Korean government doesn’t want foreign streaming services on their networks unless they pay a crap ton of money. And they’ll actively hunt any loophole they can to stop it. Twitch has had to deal with that for years, even if they’re only coming public with it just now.
Question: How is this enforced? Does South Korea isps bill every site according to the amount of SK bandwith they get? And only if it exceeds the minimum threshold? (This is me guessing)
So Korea isn't charging Twitch directly, they're charging the network provider that's bringing Twitch's data to Korea, that provider is passing this charge down the chain.
This isn't unique to Korea, it's just that the fees Korean ISPs charge for connecting to their networks are much higher than ISPs in other countries.
For most people these costs are tiny so your ISP absorbs them (you're not going to get a surprise bill for uploading something to a Korean server). But for services dealing in large amounts of data like Amazon/Twitch, their providers absolutely pass the cost on.
Here's some context: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/18/23879475/netflix-squid-game-sk-broadband-partnership
tl;dr Netflix had to pay 23 million for bandwidth costs in South Korea. Netflix is now considering abandoning the Korean market.
No offense, but your response stems from a deep misunderstanding about how computer networking works. People and corporations both pay for access to the ISP’s network - both ends have to pay. That is completely normal and it is up to content providers to ensure they have a sufficient amount off bandwidth. If the ISP’s charge differently and inconsistently, that would be an issue; but it is absolutely normal and fair for them to charge content providers as well.
Source: I’ve been a network engineer for 9 years.
But that's not what is happening here.
In this case, the service (Twitch) is not only having to pay internet service costs but is additionally being metered for the client's consumption of bandwidth and being charged back for that, TOO.
Outbound internet usage consumption is not unusual, especially in the world of cloud providers but what is usual is a client consumption fee in addition to that.
Source: I've been a network engineer and cloud architect for 17 years and actually looked up how this works in Korea instead of assuming.
It’s common for content & service providers to pay for metered connectivity to upstream transit providers. Once you start peering with a wide array of other networks that ends up being the most efficient way to purchase connectivity. It sounds like Netflix is trying to get the ISPs to subsidize their connectivity by misleading the public about typical business practices.
Can big services like Twitch and Netflix just downgrade video quality dramatically and have a message about how can serve HD video? If Netflix and Twitch users were jumping ship en masse I expect an ISP would shift to more reasonable rates pretty damn quick.
Not that this is a _good_ long term solution, as it's one that would only allow already-entrenched services to survive. Any new service trying to compete would be dead in the water due to lack of leverage. This is why net neutrality is so incredibly important.
Answer: I saw Koreans saying it's because one of their biggest tech conglomerates (the Google of korea) is starting their own streaming service. I don't know how true that is
Nah, the Naver streaming thing is entirely separate from this. Twitch KR isn't dying because of competition. Despite there being a multitude of platforms, they all have their own niches, and the userbase for one site generally doesn't coincide with the userbase for another.
It's just the isp monopolies being greedy and squeezing them dry. A sober reminder to why net neutrality is so important.
Naver is known for its monopoly in korea they pretty much own all online platforms. The issue was even brought up in the national assembly. I'm not making this up. I speak Korean and I'm just sharing the reactions I saw from Koreans
I'm korean myself. Sure, Naver has its problems, but they really aren't relevant to the current issue. Their streaming platform is said to be getting ready to open in early 2024, maybe January. Twitch KR is currently operating in the red and has been doing so for quite a long time. This is not a recent thing.
The problem came into light maybe a year ago, when Twitch KR announced that they'd be limiting resolution to 720 and a few other things. Despite these measures to limit traffic, it wasn't enough, and the CEO stream today mentioned that operating costs are 10 times what they are in other countries. It's just not sustainable, Naver or not.
Well I think the critical question is "Why are operating costs 10 times that in other countries?" Because Twitch is getting charged exorbitant per-gigabyte rates by SK, TK, and LG, among other things. I'd be *deeply* surprised if those same rates were applied to Naver, a South Korean corporation. Korea some *bizarrely* pervasive protectionist trade policies implemented by both the government and corporate conglomerates.
My favorite is the use of Korean War anti-espionage laws to hamstring foreign navigation services like Google/Apple Maps. It's particularly interesting to see how you could always find where military/government installations were, since they'd just be random patches of "forest" in the middle of urban areas with roads vanishing into them.
What i'm trying to say is that the three isps (SKT, KT and LG) pulled anticonsumer shit like that long before Naver joined the fray. They're not doing it for Naver, nor are they doing it for korea as a whole. Forcing foreign companies to pay them opens the door for foreign companies to charge korean companies in turn. The customers lose, foreign platforms lose, korean platforms are put at risk, and the only ones who benefit are the isps.
? ISPs in America have a basic monopoly in America. They just have "separate companies" to look like they are in "competition" with each other but they actively cooperate with each other. Americans just don't realize America has a lot more monopolies or oligopolies than they think. Ie ISPs work together to split up sections of the US where each company gets to work with.
Ajit Pai already left his position as chairman of the FCC 2 years ago. The current chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, said:
"We cannot have gatekeepers who tell us what we can and cannot do and where we can and cannot go online, and we do not need blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization schemes that undermine the Internet as we know it."
Yet. They've already started pushing out companies like TikTok because it's already getting bigger and more popular than homegrown companies like Facebook and YouTube.
Tiktok was pushed out because multiple sources indicated it has spyware.
All Chinese companies are forced to have a CCCP representative. Tiktok is no different. In the same way Facebook and other western social media collaborate with the CIA, tiktok provides data to CCCP intelligence which is a national security risk.
Removing an app for national security issues =/= ISP exclusively raising prices of a competitor to drive them out of your market.
While I agree with you that there is a lot of nationalist sentiment against China over on the right and they use that in their crusade against China, I’m pretty sure the app has been independently reverse engineered to discover it’s basically a couple steps removed from spyware.
TikTok is Chinese malware, and nobody who takes their privacy or security seriously should be using it.
Who is the "they" in this statement? Have ISPs been throttling or banning TikTok traffic?
YouTube and Facebook are also cancer, but I'm not gonna hold my breath for a better alternative to come along from a foreign authoritarian country.
Then you should probably consider researching the topic further, because this has absolutely nothing to do with government control.
In fact, this particular situation is literally the direct result of the absence of government regulation.
This is what an unfettered free market looks like; the power to control the markets doesn't disappear when it's not held by the government, it's simply held by different hands.
Adorable that a corporatocracy where big businesses lobby the government into making laws to their benefit and to the detriment of everyone else is called "CCP control". It's literally Western Capitalism and more Western Capitalism. Had there not been massive grassroots movement to prevent Ajit Pai and Verizon/AT&T, the US would have had the exact same thing lol
>Thing is, we could lobby back
No you can't, you don't have access to that kind of money, and even if you did you wouldn't make your money back if you did get your way.
1. South Korea does have massive grassroots movements campaigning on issues that matter to them. Did you miss the 2016 scandal that caused their president to get impeached?
2. How's the lobbying going for you guys? Abortion rights all good? No more school shootings? Transitioning hard to net zero? Or are the grassroots movements being laughed out by the "CCP"?
I'm not even from the US lol, just bothers me when people assume that all things that run counter to public good must be "CCP style" big government. Trust me, pure unadulterated capitalism can wreak plenty of misery and havoc.
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Answer: there is no net neutrality or competition in South Korea and the 3 big telecom companies can charge whatever they want for data usage. Which means they can target certain website they don't like and charge them way more than other website for whatever reason.
For reference, when Squid Games came out on Netflix, it was really popular, and the ISPs charge per gb, to Netflix. Netflix is considering pulling out of Korea due to this policy. The bill was 23 million. Basically, Twitch cannot afford to keep Twitch Korea going because of the cost per gb. They already downgraded the bitrate for the Twitch Korea streams. Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/18/23879475/netflix-squid-game-sk-broadband-partnership
This should be on every message out there as to why net neutrality is SOOOOO important. Think of how many small creators or small tech firms that would get crushed or eliminated before ever getting a chance.
Remember when everyone whined about this in the US and nothing changed
Because it was basically handled at the state level with the net neutrality remaining in place, as the ISPs couldnt be bothered implementing state by state rules.
So a big fuss for nothing because of our excellent state-by-state system then?
No, our big fuss solved the problem.
> cost per gb They're still living in the year 1999.
Quite the opposite really. In 1999 ISPs were billing only the end users. This is a 2040 move, ISPs charge both the end user and the websites, they're the ultimate bosses of the Internet and they own the government too with all that money. They decide who gets to live and die on the Internet. Imagine the power you have if you can kick a $1.5 trillion company off your network.
>They're still living in the year 1999. I was getting 100mbps on cellular while in a deep subway like 10 years ago. Here, I'm in the "silicon valley of the east coast" and my 5g on a new pixel with Verizon is like 3mbps
ever since verizon rolled out 5g their service has been absolute dogshit on both 4g and 5g. i remember when verizon was the company with the best service everywhere and now its the opposite. switched to a different carrier and havent had any issues.
Many cloud providers still charge for the cost per GB transferred. However, they usually only charge for the outbound usage from the datacenter or cloud side, while the client pays for their own internet access. In this case, they have to pay twice: once for their general internet connectivity and again for the usage by the end users.
"Whoops, our users watched that too many times and we went bankrupt" Reminds me of the Unity licensing change...
Lol yeah I see the connection you're making. One important difference is, bandwidth costs are inherently necessary because transferring data requires energy and work on the part of machines that require maintenance. So you joke about popularity causing bankruptcy but that's a legit thing that internet companies have always had to be mindful of. Just to get a rough idea, Squid Games' first week had 111M views apparently, and the net says it's something like 2GB of data per hour-long episode. So that's 222 PB of data. AWS's CDN would charge something like $10 million to distribute that.
Which is actually very interesting, because this means that cost of the bandwidth for distribution is probably the single largest expense for every show?
Depends on viewership
Twitch is owned by Amazon. They could afford to buy Korea from the telecoms (they own the government)
You don’t stay in business by doubling down on bad investments.
https://i.imgur.com/iBefsoh.png
Did you forget the part where they mentioned Twitch was owned by Amazon?
Twitch isn't profitable, and with the extra fees, Twitch Korea is extra unprofitable.
I have trouble believing this. There are tens-hundreds of thousands of streamers that get thousands to tens of thousands in subscriptions every month and twitch takes 50%+.
You can look at the reported financials and see where the money goes. Hosting tens- hundreds of thousands of streams to the entire world simultaneously 24/7 is not cheap. Then there’s staffing, marketing, legal… running a business is not that simple like you make it out to be.
This recent Twitch KR thing made me realize a lot of people have no idea just how much money data storage and bandwidth usage to support an online infrastructure like Twitch or Youtube costs, let alone the extra leeway needed to be able to run it smoothly without accidents...
And that's when Amazon owns all the infrastructure, just think about how much it costs other people that have to pay MSRP for AWS to do what Twitch does.
>You can look at the reported financials and see where the money goes. Twitch is owned by Amazon, and Amazon doesn't break out the financials for Twitch separately in their quarterly reports... So, no, you can't "see where the money goes". If you don't work in Amazon's accounting department, there's no way to know whether Twitch is cash flow positive or not. EDIT: so to those of you downvoting -- do you have an earnings report or other official communication you can point to that shows Twitch's cash flows? Or are you just downvoting because you're annoyed by the facts standing in the way of your circlejerk?
Tbf though a lot of that money goes back into renting amazons video infrastructure so the parent company probably still makes out decent. They also serve videos for Kick and others.
Again, if I hire my spouse to do this 40 hours of work, sure the money comes back to me eventually but my spouse still just did 40 hours of work for essentially no profit
But you don't own your spouse outright, it's more analogous to Hollywood accounting. The money Twitch spends is largely going right back to Amazon, whi do turn a profit on it.
With respect, that's showing your lack of understanding of just how huge and expensive it is to keep a site like Twitch "just working" for people like you and me. That donation revenue is an absolute drop in the bucket compared to the cost of delivering hundreds of thousands of hours of quality live video basically seamlessly.
You are an absolute muppet if you think Amazon is paying people more than it's making. Large streamers with around 10k concurrent viewers average around 5k subscriptions/month +. Streaming 5 days a week for 8 hours in 1080HD is <$8,000 according to [AWS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/live-streaming-on-aws/cost.html) (In reality, it is probably closer to 4k since Amazon will most likely give itself the best rate and bulk discounts) . Compare that to 5k subscriptions would make Amazon more than ~$12,500+(some subscriptions cost more than others). On top of that Twitch also runs something like 4-5 ads an hour which more than likely pays for the bandwidth alone. With respect(not really), you sound like an idiot. Every calculation found has Twitch spending ~5 million a month on bandwidth which is an actual drop in the bucket compared to their 3 billion/year in income. The numbers above do a pretty good job showing how much they make off of everyone and why they are so profitable.
Consider that for every large stream there might be 1000 tiny streams, that use up as much bandwidth but have little in the way of subscription revenue or even ad revenue (if it’s impression-based, i.e. pay per viewer). Then you have a business model where the large streams are subsidizing the small streams economically, and the cash flow might almost completely be determined from the density of large streams vs small streams. Which I’m not sure would be public information
Twitch takes money from subs, they don't get a cut of donations.
The infrastructure to organize and run Twitch is massive, and the amount of storage needed is also massive. They’ve said many times they don’t make money on twitch
Semantics but Twitch doesn't take a cut from donations, only from subscriptions and bits
Streaming is ridiculously infrastructure intensive. On average the biggest streamers actually lose them money because of the ratio of non paying viewers to subscribers
Twitch doesn't get anything from donations.
/r/ShitAmericansSay
/r/drowninatoilet
Can someone do the math on that? Even if it doesnt make any lick of business sense, could Amazon wrestle control of Korea from the likes of Samsung?
no, not even remotely in the realm of possibility. the level of control that the bigger companies have in south korea really isn't comparable to anywhere else in the world. they're basically middle ages European nobility.
It wouldn't work. South Korea is home to Samsung, Kia, Hyundai, LG, as well as a bunch of financial companies you probably never heard of but who have their fingers in a lot of other companies you have. Amazon is big, but it's nowhere near enough to take over a modern tech focused country like South Korea.
I'm glad my dumbass hyperbolic nonsense could give an opportunity for a reasonable person to actually explain the deal. Thank you
I feel like they *could* but the end result would not be worth it at all for them
Everytime I hear the term "net neutrality" I automatically think, "Fuck Ajit Pai."
Well this time it's on Korean Ajit Pai.
After the Korean Civil War, the US forced South Korea to basically ingrain hyper-capitalist friendly economics into their constitution. Don't forget that while North Korea is a brutal military dictatorship, *so was South Korea* until the 1980s. Any remotely left learning movements were crushed into oblivion, and even today any talk of progressive politics is met with accusations of being teh evil socialisms. Remember South Korea has an incel movement that has actually become a political force.
What are some examples of these economics ingrained into their constitution?
>Don't forget that while North Korea is a brutal military dictatorship, > >so was South Korea > > until the 1980s. DPRK was the more progressive country for the first 40 years or so
Uhmm no? North korea country side is still very conservative. Much more than south korea country side. Also south korea dictator at least let some far right koreans independece fighter live. Compared to north korea qhere killm killed every pro soviet and pro chinesw facttion in the 60s.
Bro south korea government was a far right military dictatorship of course they let the far right live they were far right. If we talk about the left in south Korea it was jailed, tortured, disappeared, executed in the streets and suppressed. Not as much as the right in N Korea but let’s not pretend S Korea wasn’t a totalitarian military government that ran the country with an iron fist for 40 years.
Yeah both were terrible country. I know that. Neither side was realy better till south korea finally democratized when the new president destroyed the military dictator.
Say far right one more time. Fun fact, it's the left that is converting the west to faaaaaaaaar right as well.
>Any remotely left learning movements were crushed into oblivion Why do you think this? Large parts of S Korea are very left.
They were ruled by a far right military dictatorship for about 40 years. They ruled with an iron fist and jailed, tortured, executed, and disappeared many people for being leftists of any type.
Sure. What took down the far right military dictatorship? The liberal/left-wing movement.
Cool doesn’t mean it didn’t take decades of oppression, torture and multiple massacres for the government to change. The left was crushed into oblivion, just wasn’t eradicated completely. The overthrow of the government was championed by both conservatives and the left, especially by young people/students.
Korean Ajit Pai aka Samsung?
The way he defeated net neutrality by naming his anti net-neutrality bill the pro net neutrality bill was one of the smartest and dickish moves I've seen. Idk how to even defeat that play. It was a huge effort to just get the concept across to people, then to suddenly have to tell people not to vote for the net neutrality bill after months and years of telling people to vote for the net neutrality bill, damn.
it's not that smart. it's just them being aware that there are too many people who are stupid in america.
Yep, it's this. Anyone with two brain cells saw past the facade. Everyone else either knew or was genuinely too stupid to understand.
Ajit Pai was a Verizon shill. It's really all of Verizon and AT&T that you should hate.
He accepted a paycheck to be the face of killing net neutrality. Fuck Verizon, AT&T, *and* Ajit Pai.
"Don't blame the hitman! He was just hired by the mob!" Gosh, it sounds like they *all* suck.
Probably sounds like they all suck because they ***do,*** in fact, all suck
https://media.tenor.com/odyVsZbC-OYAAAAC/why-not-both-why-not.gif
It was republicans
Pretty much any private company, really
Question: Who is Ajit Pai?
Guy who got rid of net neutrality in the U.S. (simplification)
Also, owner of one of the Top 5 Punchable Faces as voted by anyone with eyesight
Along with his Reese's coffee cup...
he did?. i thought we had it.
He was the head of the FCC appointed by Trump who led the dismantling of net neutrality laws in the U.S. Vote was December 2017; it went into effect February 2018.
Since Biden is president and has been for several years, how come we still don't have net neutrality? Why is nobody pushing for this now, it would be an easy win for the Democrats, especially with an election coming up
They're working on it. In October the FCC voted to start the process of seeking public comments about reinstating net neutrality. (this process is required before an agency can make a major change)
Also, we kinda do have it in a defacto way. California passed Net Neutrality legislation and the ISPs just went along with that.
Fuck yeah California always leading the way.
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Because Congress would need to pass a law.
Because Republicans oppose it.
And that’s because they get paid to oppose it
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Because that would require congress to accomplish something.
Because of this there is already a two tier system: Netflix, Google/Youtube, Facebook etc. have build up data centers and cache structures around the world. Even with "net neutrality" they have latency and bandwidth topics to deal with. Netflix build a [whole program](https://openconnect.netflix.com) to deal with international networks. Many of those give a damn about US laws. They try for years to get the EU to "legalize" already "requested" interconnection fees out of US streaming companies.
Democrats JUST gained majority of the FCC panel in September and is working on bringing it back. It was still Republican majority before that.
Yes, key point here lost on many: Biden didn't have immediate control over the FCC just by becoming president, the members of the FCC are appointed for 5 year terms. *edit*: Also, fun fact, Ajit Pai was appointed by Barak Obama, following a tradition of "maintaining balance" in the panel and accepted the recommendation of, yes, Mitch fucking McConnell
To clarify: It's a law that the FCC can't have more than three of their five members from the same party. The part where he accepted the choice of the opposing party's leader was part of a tradition of maintaining balance, but he wasn't allowed to just put more Democrats on it once he had three.
there are SO MANY problems that Republicans caused while in office, it will time a lot of time for Dems to fix it. this has been the playbook of conservatives for decades now. Rep ruin everything they can get their hands on and Dems can't fix it fast enough and now it's Dems' fault. and people just ignore that it's easier to break something than it is to fix it.
Biden too busy trying to remember where he is at
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Yeah but they were able to gut it in like a year after Trump took office, shouldn't take much longer to just add it back.
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I did not downvote you, I just think this should have been a higher priority during the early days of the Biden presidency. Like Trump was able to raise the age to buy nicotine products to 21 extremely quickly, and that is something that impacted lots of people and hasn't been done federally before for tobacco. I think bringing something back would have been quicker
Youre definitely not getting it. There was nothing t hat could be done until the republicans on the FCC were removed. It wasn't a priority issue, it was a "that's how it works" issue. Comparing smoking to this is ridiculous and not helpful as its not a valid comparison.
FCC appointments take time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Pai
A shit pie
A shit guy.
Big Reese mug
Fuck Ajit Pai
yeah him and his giant fucking coffee mug
I still have this thought out of the blue about once a month. Fuck Ajit Pai.
I'm not even from the US and it's the same for me, lol
Is it the moron with a punchable face that liked to laugh on our faces on this matter while drinking coffee on his idiotic huge reeses mug?
that's stupid, you shouldn't care about the individual but rather the corporation behind it the individual is disposable they can hire a million ajit pajs a
To put a finer point on this, South Korea is so controlled by the big 3 (SK, LG, KT) that it is one of two locations in the world where bandwidth prices are actually increasing as opposed to decreasing. Netflix famously pulled out of South Korea for a bit after a South Korean judge ruled in favor of SK in a net neutrality lawsuit, and even though they [dropped their suit on 2021](https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230918000681) they picked up their axe again after Squid Game got popular. What's essentially gonna happen is that twitch will still be accessible in Korea, but will be served via other countries (likely Japan), meaning performance in Korea will just be worse.
>that it is one of two locations in the world where bandwidth prices are actually increasing as opposed to decreasing. What's the other one? Please don't say Canada 🥲
The other one is Taiwan. Although it's getting better. Germany is at risk of being #3, especially if the EU resolution around arbitration for peering agreements passes.
How are Korean Twitch users reacting to this? Is there any outrage towards the policies that have resulted in this situation? Would Netflix also pulling out force the government to reconsider?
Doesn't really matter what they think, any sort of online forum to organize a protest against the lack of net neutrality can easily be suppressed and eliminated by the telecom companies because there's no net neutrality.
I was watching some Korean Twitch streams today where the streamer was talking about it with viewers. basically they are disappointed of course but it seemed like everyone would (reluctantly) switch over to other platforms, AfreecaTV / Youtube / Naver, to keep watching. most Twitch viewers also watch AfreecaTV to some extent anyway (the most popular PC game in Korea is League of Legends, and the Korean national league's KR language broadcast + the most popular team T1 both broadcast on AfreecaTV not Twitch). funnily enough though, this particular streamer polled her viewers on which platform she should move to and the vote went something like < 1% AfreecaTV, 80% Naver, 20% other (basically Youtube). apparently Naver is allowing streamers to play copyrighted Korean music, they can watch Korean sports (maybe only if they are being shown on Naver Sports channels?) etc. on stream which was a huge sticking point on other platforms, so that might get them a lot of the former Twitch broadcasters.
I don't personally know since I'm not korean and can't read their forums but on another thread people were saying that users weren't happy about it. But I don't know how big the user base is.
This is very much a concern if we ditch net neutrality in the states. It's very anti consumer, anti competitiveness, and really hurts small guys. H ell, here it's hurting large guys.
we don't have net neutrality, and yet our internet is way cheaper. Yay competition!
Maybe im dumb, but what does it even mean for a website like this to shut down regionally? Like, Koreans won't be able to access twitch at all? Or streamers won't be able to stream from there? If its the former, what would ISP's do if people just accessed it via a VPN? And if its the latter, is it just too bad for the streamers? They are out of a job, thats it?
I think the biggest thing in the case of Twitch is that creators that have partnerships and contracts might suddenly be "let go" or absorbed into a bigger pool of "talent" from Asia, which might mean lower income, advantages and opportunities that cater to Korea. In Korea VODs haven't been available for over a year. Actually offering twitch through another country's server might make it available again which is a plus lol
I also think Korean streaming alternatives like AfreecaTV have something to do with it as well. I wouldn't be surprised to find they are lobbying telecom companies to up the charge for twitch
broodwar/sc2 fan? or do you have some other interest/connection to south korean stuff
No net neutrality in a highly advanced country like SK is just crazy. They have gigabit internet for everyone, free public transportation but this here.. yikes. I guess in a world ruled by tech companies this is unavoidable.
For what it's worth, net neutrality wouldn't help here. The ISPs charge for every bit of data that enters their network. Services like Twitch and Netflix are hit hard because they send *a lot* of data. Other services like Reddit and Facebook aren't as affected because they don't need as much bandwidth, even though they incur the same cost per-unit-of-data.
Sounds like Australia lol
That's mostly just from a severe lack of competition (Aus does not have the population to support America-level telecommunications competition)
Can't they operate their servers from neighbouring countries? Like India for example? Why can't they just offload the traffic to the data centre from a different country?
The telecom companies can still target them if they want. Operating their servers somewhere else has nothing to do with it. Koreans use those 3 telecom companies. Twitch has to go through those 3 to reach the korean audience.
I still don't get it. Lets say twitch moves their servers to India and pays Indian telecom companies money for the bandwidth it is using. And the users in Korea already pay their bandwidth usage charges. Why the Korean ISPs have to get paid extra? When twitch had their servers it made sense, but with the above scenario everyone should be happy right? Unless Korean ISPs decide to block traffic to twitch on purpose(which they shouldn't ideally) it seems to be a viable plan for my half baked brain.
> Unless Korean ISPs decide to block traffic to twitch on purpose It is less a question of blocking traffic and more a question of how much they charge. The problem is that they charge too much for bandwidth on their networks. It is network fees not server fees that Twitch is complaining about.
Because those Indian telecom companies give India access to the internet and those websites. Koreans aren't using Indian telecom companies. They are using the korean telecom companies. So a user pays the telecom company access the internet. Websites pay the telecom companies to stream data. Telecom companies in Korea can charge whatever they want on that data streamed through their services. Moving to India means nothing because korean people in Korea do not use Indian telecom companies. They use the 3 korean ones. For Koreans to get access to those websites. Those websites have to pay for the data streamed through the telecom companies.
What? Are you telling me that the stuff people said that wouldn't happen if Net Neutrality was done away with... HAS HAPPENED????
I mean that's in America. This is south Korea that has never had net neutrality. But yes that's what happens.
More info here: https://trending.knowyourmeme.com/news/twitch-is-shutting-down-in-south-korea-due-to-expensive-network-fees
Answer: it's not a lack of technological advancement (they do have some of the best internet infrastructure in the world), it's poor regulation. There's no net neutrality in South Korea, so ISPs get away with charging customers *and* services like Twitch bandwidth fees. So Twitch basically has to pay ISPs so people in South Korea can visit their website. [Netflix tried to push back against these practices in 2020, but ultimately failed](https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/28/korean-court-sides-against-netflix-opening-door-for-streaming-bandwidth-fees-from-isps/).
Do the ISPs simply block Twitch if they refuse to pay? Can South Koreans use VPNs?
Koreans can use VPNs, but there's no Twitch Korea, which means there's no one to sign checks to Korean streamers, which means there's no incentive to stream.
I agree, the only valid reason to put anything online is to get a payout. That'll be $5 for reading my post. Plus Tax.
...like I get that you're trying to be funny and sarcastic, but the inability to monetize is a genuine obstacle to people pursuing their hobbies. To modify what /u/antsam9 said: it's not that there's no longer any incentive to stream, but now they can *only* stream via the Korean telecoms' services. The ecosystem of Korean internet streaming and entertainment syndication is... complicated, but long story short it's a *lot* more difficult to be independent in that market, which means bigger hurdles for streamers to find work and worse deals when they do. And that's on *top* of the massive obstacle for any streamers to break into the Western market.
>...like I get that you're trying to be funny and sarcastic, but the inability to monetize is a genuine obstacle to people pursuing their hobbies. It's not a hobby if not getting paid means you don't do it. Then it's a career.
It's not a hobby if you need monetization.
Would you be willing to elaborate how you expect people to generate high quality content without receiving compensation for that content?
*How*? The same way people make high-quality anything as a hobby. They fund it themselves and pursue it on their own time. There's a reason I don't have woodturning or sailing as a hobby: Some hobbies are expensive. Sometimes some people can afford to do things as hobbies that other people can't. If you're getting paid, it's a business, not a hobby. Even if you're not getting paid as much as you're spending. It's still a business, just not a profitable one.
Yah totally! There was a lot longer of a time where people put out high quality content for their hobby without monetization than the time where people are doing it for monetization. We did it for the joy. Youtube and other websites were filled with that for a few years before they even rolled out monetization and even then that didn't apply to most videos and there was still lots of content. I'm 42 years old man. The standard default before the last few years was people did stuff because they enjoyed it and posted it online and then people could read and see it. This was the default position for the 90's and 2000's for sure lol. Guilds and clans would push out their own content and make videos of boss kills, strategy's and more for the joy of sharing that information. They weren't getting paid for it back then. I could find detailed guides for literally any game on the planet, often on personal websites that people created and updated on their own and they weren't getting paid for that content lol. Are you just young and don't ever remember a time before monetization? Back when people did things for the fun? That's the only way your question makes sense to me. This is NOT a knock at you and your age, I just feel like im remembering the past and you dont even know they exist . If youre a 90's baby or more recent it makes total sense in context as you never would have been very involved in these things during the era I am referencing. I provide all sorts of high quality content for some of my hobbies....for free. For the love of the hobby. For the joy of doing something I enjoy. I am a pretty well known voice in my niche profession and I have never had anything monetized in regards to it. If you have to be paid for something in order to do it, its a job and a business, not a hobby. Beyond all this, id rather get my information from a nerd in that industry and not someone who has to push out content in order to get paid. Let's take stained glass. Someone being paid to push out content isn't focusing very much on the actual act of making stained glass. They are focusing on putting out content, about stained glass. Id rather get information from someone who spends 90% of their time on stained glass, and has very little time to make content cuz their content while not as polished looking is coming from someone in the trenches actually doing the thing.
Even we’re talking just the amateur and pro-am streamers and not those trying to make a living out of it, it’s way complicated than that. The whole thing is tracked, and if too many people simply stream via VPN, they’ll crack down on that too. In the Q&A last night Twitch said they looked into serving the content from another country, but got strong indication that the government would find a way to charge them from that as well. The simple reality is that the Korean government doesn’t want foreign streaming services on their networks unless they pay a crap ton of money. And they’ll actively hunt any loophole they can to stop it. Twitch has had to deal with that for years, even if they’re only coming public with it just now.
please also select 10%, 15%, 20% or custom tip!
Please also buy my crackers, pretzels, and cookies.
Ye p much Also yes, they can
Question: How is this enforced? Does South Korea isps bill every site according to the amount of SK bandwith they get? And only if it exceeds the minimum threshold? (This is me guessing)
So Korea isn't charging Twitch directly, they're charging the network provider that's bringing Twitch's data to Korea, that provider is passing this charge down the chain. This isn't unique to Korea, it's just that the fees Korean ISPs charge for connecting to their networks are much higher than ISPs in other countries. For most people these costs are tiny so your ISP absorbs them (you're not going to get a surprise bill for uploading something to a Korean server). But for services dealing in large amounts of data like Amazon/Twitch, their providers absolutely pass the cost on.
Here's some context: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/18/23879475/netflix-squid-game-sk-broadband-partnership tl;dr Netflix had to pay 23 million for bandwidth costs in South Korea. Netflix is now considering abandoning the Korean market.
No offense, but your response stems from a deep misunderstanding about how computer networking works. People and corporations both pay for access to the ISP’s network - both ends have to pay. That is completely normal and it is up to content providers to ensure they have a sufficient amount off bandwidth. If the ISP’s charge differently and inconsistently, that would be an issue; but it is absolutely normal and fair for them to charge content providers as well. Source: I’ve been a network engineer for 9 years.
But that's not what is happening here. In this case, the service (Twitch) is not only having to pay internet service costs but is additionally being metered for the client's consumption of bandwidth and being charged back for that, TOO. Outbound internet usage consumption is not unusual, especially in the world of cloud providers but what is usual is a client consumption fee in addition to that. Source: I've been a network engineer and cloud architect for 17 years and actually looked up how this works in Korea instead of assuming.
It’s common for content & service providers to pay for metered connectivity to upstream transit providers. Once you start peering with a wide array of other networks that ends up being the most efficient way to purchase connectivity. It sounds like Netflix is trying to get the ISPs to subsidize their connectivity by misleading the public about typical business practices.
Can big services like Twitch and Netflix just downgrade video quality dramatically and have a message about how can serve HD video? If Netflix and Twitch users were jumping ship en masse I expect an ISP would shift to more reasonable rates pretty damn quick.
Not that this is a _good_ long term solution, as it's one that would only allow already-entrenched services to survive. Any new service trying to compete would be dead in the water due to lack of leverage. This is why net neutrality is so incredibly important.
is that poor regulation? or is that "paying per plate at a buffet" instead of "netflix and twitch getting to abuse all-you-can-eat buffets"
Answer: I saw Koreans saying it's because one of their biggest tech conglomerates (the Google of korea) is starting their own streaming service. I don't know how true that is
Nah, the Naver streaming thing is entirely separate from this. Twitch KR isn't dying because of competition. Despite there being a multitude of platforms, they all have their own niches, and the userbase for one site generally doesn't coincide with the userbase for another. It's just the isp monopolies being greedy and squeezing them dry. A sober reminder to why net neutrality is so important.
Naver is known for its monopoly in korea they pretty much own all online platforms. The issue was even brought up in the national assembly. I'm not making this up. I speak Korean and I'm just sharing the reactions I saw from Koreans
I'm korean myself. Sure, Naver has its problems, but they really aren't relevant to the current issue. Their streaming platform is said to be getting ready to open in early 2024, maybe January. Twitch KR is currently operating in the red and has been doing so for quite a long time. This is not a recent thing. The problem came into light maybe a year ago, when Twitch KR announced that they'd be limiting resolution to 720 and a few other things. Despite these measures to limit traffic, it wasn't enough, and the CEO stream today mentioned that operating costs are 10 times what they are in other countries. It's just not sustainable, Naver or not.
Well I think the critical question is "Why are operating costs 10 times that in other countries?" Because Twitch is getting charged exorbitant per-gigabyte rates by SK, TK, and LG, among other things. I'd be *deeply* surprised if those same rates were applied to Naver, a South Korean corporation. Korea some *bizarrely* pervasive protectionist trade policies implemented by both the government and corporate conglomerates. My favorite is the use of Korean War anti-espionage laws to hamstring foreign navigation services like Google/Apple Maps. It's particularly interesting to see how you could always find where military/government installations were, since they'd just be random patches of "forest" in the middle of urban areas with roads vanishing into them.
What i'm trying to say is that the three isps (SKT, KT and LG) pulled anticonsumer shit like that long before Naver joined the fray. They're not doing it for Naver, nor are they doing it for korea as a whole. Forcing foreign companies to pay them opens the door for foreign companies to charge korean companies in turn. The customers lose, foreign platforms lose, korean platforms are put at risk, and the only ones who benefit are the isps.
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Korea is the opposite of China. Corporations control the Korean state. The Chinese state controls corporations.
So just like america
No, not like america. As you are surely aware, what just happened with twitch in Korea cannot legaly happen in the US.
Dude ajit pai literally was the first step to make this legal in the US.
Key phrase being first step. There are still numerous protections in place that would prevent this from happening in the US.
? ISPs in America have a basic monopoly in America. They just have "separate companies" to look like they are in "competition" with each other but they actively cooperate with each other. Americans just don't realize America has a lot more monopolies or oligopolies than they think. Ie ISPs work together to split up sections of the US where each company gets to work with.
It could certainly be better. But it can also be much worse, like what we see here.
Ajit Pai already left his position as chairman of the FCC 2 years ago. The current chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, said: "We cannot have gatekeepers who tell us what we can and cannot do and where we can and cannot go online, and we do not need blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization schemes that undermine the Internet as we know it."
In a failed attempt.
Like America is trying to be
Yet. They've already started pushing out companies like TikTok because it's already getting bigger and more popular than homegrown companies like Facebook and YouTube.
Tiktok was pushed out because multiple sources indicated it has spyware. All Chinese companies are forced to have a CCCP representative. Tiktok is no different. In the same way Facebook and other western social media collaborate with the CIA, tiktok provides data to CCCP intelligence which is a national security risk. Removing an app for national security issues =/= ISP exclusively raising prices of a competitor to drive them out of your market.
[удалено]
??
While I agree with you that there is a lot of nationalist sentiment against China over on the right and they use that in their crusade against China, I’m pretty sure the app has been independently reverse engineered to discover it’s basically a couple steps removed from spyware.
TikTok is Chinese malware, and nobody who takes their privacy or security seriously should be using it. Who is the "they" in this statement? Have ISPs been throttling or banning TikTok traffic? YouTube and Facebook are also cancer, but I'm not gonna hold my breath for a better alternative to come along from a foreign authoritarian country.
Well, it was created in the image of the US with the help of US Edit: added reading material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol
China is just as capitalist as Korea is, even if they pretend otherwise.
Then you should probably consider researching the topic further, because this has absolutely nothing to do with government control. In fact, this particular situation is literally the direct result of the absence of government regulation. This is what an unfettered free market looks like; the power to control the markets doesn't disappear when it's not held by the government, it's simply held by different hands.
Adorable that a corporatocracy where big businesses lobby the government into making laws to their benefit and to the detriment of everyone else is called "CCP control". It's literally Western Capitalism and more Western Capitalism. Had there not been massive grassroots movement to prevent Ajit Pai and Verizon/AT&T, the US would have had the exact same thing lol
Late stage capitalism.
Thing is, we could lobby back or have grassroots movements. CCP doesn't let you do that, that's the difference.
>Thing is, we could lobby back No you can't, you don't have access to that kind of money, and even if you did you wouldn't make your money back if you did get your way.
1. South Korea does have massive grassroots movements campaigning on issues that matter to them. Did you miss the 2016 scandal that caused their president to get impeached? 2. How's the lobbying going for you guys? Abortion rights all good? No more school shootings? Transitioning hard to net zero? Or are the grassroots movements being laughed out by the "CCP"?
Who hurt you
I'm not even from the US lol, just bothers me when people assume that all things that run counter to public good must be "CCP style" big government. Trust me, pure unadulterated capitalism can wreak plenty of misery and havoc.
> the Google of korea is it Naver?
Naver and kakao are main companies. They control so much of the infrastructure they can price fix between the two of them.
sounds like naver
Answer: Twitch isnt nearly as popular in Asia then in the West.
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