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> South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic It's impressive how th

by jonnat 5y ago

> South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic It's impressive how this framing has gotten so much acceptance. The content providers are not generating the traffic, the users are, and they are paying their ISPs to be able to do so.

mrpopo 5y ago
If anything, customers should be suing ISPs every time they don't get the expected bandwidth. It's the ISP that fails to deliver according to the contract.
- dwighttk 5y ago
  I bet there is fine print that says they are delivering exactly according to the contract
  - xoa 5y ago
    You're certainly right, and the specific term here for what consumers should, but generally don't, have is a "Service Level Agreement" (SLA). This is pretty standard for business links and nearly anything at all at the datacenter level, if you ever subscribe to a whole line at a colo you'll probably see that. SLAs tend to spell out not just maximum sustained bandwidth, but 90/95/97/99%, uptime, what if any burst bandwidth is available, any latency guarantees, etc. All of these are different measures that cost different amounts to hit at any given level, and SLAs spell out exactly what is being paid for in numbers that can be monitored fairly easily. If I could make one simple change to the home broadband market, it would be insisting on a standardized big number consumer level SLA. I certainly don't expect residential rates to cover the same 99.97% or worst case minimum that business class does, that's a major part of what higher end connections are paying for. But whatever they do offer should be transparent, fixed for contract period and measurable. ISPs should by law be required to spell out not just the top line bandwidth level, but also 75%/95% guarantees over a standard time (day/month maybe) and what the worst case guaranteed minimum is. This wouldn't be some big centralized bureaucratic decision about implementations or what numbers have to be hit, but rather merely make sure the market has clear information so customers can compare and ISPs could be held to their promises. Energy Star consumer information might be some guide to layout, but I think something like that would be low hanging fruit. Also to be clear, a distinction can and should be made for intra-network vs inter-network, and both should be accounted for. Obviously an ISP has the most control and is the most responsible for how traffic traverses their own network to their edges, but ISPs do have some responsibility (affected by size/location) for their peering agreements too. If they're purposefully choking that it's on them, though small/remote ISPs may be at a disadvantage in negotiations there which should ideally have some eyes on it.
    - jimmydorry 5y ago
      I absolutely agree, however national or even regional level transparency reports are bullshit. It needs to be at the exchange / node level. The same ISP will have different levels of service between cities and suburbs.
  - c12 5y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised. I have a gigabit connection and the contract specifically states that they guarantee a maximum throughput of 400Mbit at peak times.
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      Guaranteeing a maximum doesn't sound like much of a guarantee.
      - david422 5y ago
        "We guarantee our performance will be subpar"
    - kmonsen 5y ago
      It's like the geico commercials: you could save up to x% on your car insurance if you switch to Geico. It says nothing, there are two weasel word exceptions in there.
      - names_are_hard 5y ago
        There's another weasel phrase in there: "Or more" (Switching to Geico could save you 15% _or more_) So it could save you nothing, or it could save you 15%, or even more. Basically we have no idea what it'll save you, if anything.
    - zsmi 5y ago
      Hopefully you mistyped and meant "they guarantee a minimum throughput of 400Mbit at peak times." Otherwise 0Mbit is consistent with the terms of the contract, which is probably exactly what the ISP was going for.
  - petre 5y ago
    That and also 'reasonable use' clauses.
- vlan0 5y ago
  I agree, but there still need to be constraints. For instance, if I have a 1Gb symmetrical connection, it's probably still unreasonable for me to expect 1Gb connecting to my buddy's 1Gb 3k miles away.
  - geocar 5y ago
    If you and your buddy use the same ISP, no it is not unreasonable.
    - vlan0 5y ago
      Right, that's likely doable on the same ISP, even 3k miles away. It does highlight a philosophical question I raised in another comment. What exactly are consumers purchasing from last mile ISPs? Is it 1Gb to anywhere on the providers network? 1Gb to the nearest CDN/Internet exchange? I don't think there is a good answer for this. But it's important to think about when we talk about ISPs reaching their hand towards large content providers.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- zakki 5y ago
  Usually the contract cover the bandwidth on last mile. The bandwidth for the internet is shared between all customers.
- xxs 5y ago
  >suing ISPs every time they don't get the expected bandwidt this is beyond flawed, unless you consider all possible bandwidth, not just Netflix being slow. The latter can be entirely an issue on Netflix side.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
moreira 5y ago
It really is wild. ISPs have been overselling "unlimited" connections for forever, and being paid for it, but when their customers actually want to use literally the service they paid for, _legally_, it's somehow wrong? I guess that's the thing with Netflix though, it's torrent-like traffic, but legal, so there's no excuse to stop it and they have to come up with something. "oh they're generating explosive traffic that's not good"
- Proven 5y ago
  You seem to spend too much time on leftist web sites. First, they aren't being paid for unlimited. Do you think that $39.99 or $199.99 per month can cover the cost of transferring unlimited amount of data to another continent? Of course, it doesn't. Somebody pays $39.99 to download 10 emails, another customer runs BitTorrent 24 by 7 consuming TB's of bandwidth for the same price. Second, they don't want to sell "unlimited" - they could make more money by selling differentiated services.
- tw04 5y ago
  The thing that's most ridiculous about this is that the bandwidth is essentially "free" for SK telecom. They sit a netflix caching server in their network and the traffic never leaves. Other than the cost of switch ports (which are dirt cheap relatively speaking) they have absolutely 0 overhead beyond power and cooling for the netflix box which again with their user count is a rounding error. I'm not sure if the lawmakers are ignorant, bought and paid for, or a little of both but it would be refreshing if one of them took 30 seconds and applied a little critical thinking to the situation.
  - piaste 5y ago
    > The thing that's most ridiculous about this is that the bandwidth is essentially "free" for SK telecom. They sit a netflix caching server in their network and the traffic never leaves. Wouldn't that require them to MITM the Netflix traffic, which I would hope is under TLS?
    - namibj 5y ago
Proven 5y ago
Yep. It's even more impressive how the average HN reader can't even comprehend this comment (or can, but somehow manages to insist on their wrong, socialist views) and continues to argue in favor of "network neutrality", even though no two users or service providers are the same. If Netflix should pay $10 mil a month to Korea's Internet providers, why not HN? If HN should pay less than Netflix, why should the user who only visits HN pay the same Internet access fee as the one who constantly watches Netflix?
anoncow 5y ago
These ISPs have no shame. Have they forgotten their role so much that they did not wake up even when they were filing a case?
thedougd 5y ago
Time to bring back ISP shaming. Netflix would notify Verizon users in the app that Verizon's slow peering was degrading their watch experience. https://bgr.com/general/netflix-vs-verizon-network/ https://bgr.com/general/netflix-vs-verizon-network/
- c12 5y ago
  Wasn't this what fast.com was created for?
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    Fast.com will let you test the idea yourself (if you already know it exists) but it will not proactively notify you otherwise.
- jandrese 5y ago
  This was one of the first wins for IPv6. I had a Hurricane Electric tunnel on my FiOS link and was able to bypass the bottleneck that Verizon set up for Netflix. Now Netflix blocks Hurricane Electric endpoints and FiOS still doesn't support IPv6. We're nearing the 10 year anniversary of that "coming soon" FAQ entry on their webpage.
Aerroon 5y ago
This seems like a really popular technique in politics. Frame the problem in a way that makes it seem unjust regardless what the wider implications are. Online ads and data vacuuming is often presented in a similar fashion. Your browser goes to the advertiser and requests the ad. The advertiser asks for your data. Your browser sends the data to the advertiser. And the way we frame this is that advertisers are stealing our data. Once a system is opaque and automated enough it doesn't seem to matter how it really works. Netflix is a big entity, therefore we blame Netflix. If Netflix didn't exist then the traffic surge wouldn't exist, therefore Netflix should pay.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
xxs 5y ago
It's quite common datacenter prices to incl. bandwidth and data. Netflix/youtube cases it's the content providers that server the traffic, so most of it is generated by them. The client requests are tiny in comparison.
- Freestyler_3 5y ago
  Lets say you have a website in datacenter A /You pay datacenter for bandwith etc. Person pulls your website /Person pays cablecompany Z for bandwith Now you have to pay Cablecompany Z for the data.
  - xxs 5y ago
    But that's not the case in the article "Netflix began using =SK's dedicated= line starting 2018 to deliver increasingly larger amounts of data-heavy, high-definition video content to viewers in Korea from servers in Japan and Hong Kong". Admittedly the article is light on the details, yet I'd presume the line has been created exclusively for Netflix, there is no info if there was an agreement between the parties. There is no reference to the Seoul District Court decision, either. "Internet"/data between major tube providers (ISP) is very different than paying cable company X for end user access. Some just have agreements to carry each other traffics and some pay to carry their traffic[0]: [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network
- nix23 5y ago
  Lets compare it with food, if you (client) would not eat so much the producer (server) would not produce as much, no server produces traffic without a consumer.
  - xxs 5y ago
    I have replied to a sibling's comment ISP agreements are nothing like that.
lrem 5y ago
A decade ago I was with an ISP who took a stand for "Google should pay us for the priviledge of having our users watch YouTube". I believe I wasn't the only one who decided that's the last straw and moved to an ISP that wasn't rejecting peering based on greed.
- pepoluan 5y ago
  Sounds like an ISP in a monopolistic situation. When there are alternatives, ISPs would bend over backwards for what customers want. That are not colluding like a cartel, of course.
  - lrem 5y ago
    Thankfully that was a market with good competition. They might have hoped to capitalise on some of that anti-American, anti-BigTech sentiment. But everyone I knew who used them was pissed at these shenanigans. Hilariously enough, I switched to a former governmental monopoly.
perryizgr8 5y ago
> The content providers are not generating the traffic, the users are Huh?? I am not serving terabytes of movies from my home connection. Netflix is.
- lowdest 5y ago
  Netflix has no association with this ISP, you do. It's your choice to request Netflix streams for delivery through the ISP. Blaming Netflix for this would be like an apartment building blaming Amazon for delivering too many boxes to the mail room.
- Arrath 5y ago
  The users are paying the ISP to have that content served to them through their connection. Is the ISP mad that more users are using more of their promised service allowance? Too bad, maybe they shouldn't oversell their networks.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  The traffic is generated by a user making a request for the movie. It isn’t like Netflix is just sending movies to users at random.
dahart 5y ago
Don’t miss the past paragraph in the article, “In the United States, Netflix has been paying a fee to broadband provider Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O) for over seven years for faster streaming speeds. https://reut.rs/2Y8wOzb” https://reut.rs/2Y8wOzb”
- ralfd 5y ago
  Two points: 1. In 2014 Netflix made similar deals with AT&T and Verizon. 2. It is not extortion by the ISP, "pay up or else". But Netflix was simply building up its own CDN-capabilities. They ditched Akamai and Limelight and for that they needed their own server endpoints into the networks. https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2014/02/heres-comcast-netflix-deal-structured-numbers.html https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2014/02/heres-comcast-net...
kijin 5y ago
The framing gets a pass because the majority of "explosive traffic" comes from foreign companies. Google and Netflix have no voice in the Korean lawmaking process. When they go to court, they fall right into the trap of the framing that local companies have already set up. South Korea is well known for having fast internet, but the internet is only fast within the small country. International connectivity has always been crappy, and getting crappier every year as telcos focus on legal avenues instead of actually laying enough undersea cables to meet the demand. In the past, most Koreans only visited Korean sites because of the language barrier; that's no longer true. But it's going to take a lot of time and money to remedy years of neglect in international connectivity. Especially SK Broadband, who IMO has been the most complacent in this department among the Big 3 telcos, precisely because of their huge domestic market share. Where is the money going to come from? Obviously not by cutting executive bonuses. SK Broadband seems to think that they can extort it out of Google and Netflix who, despite their global prominence, are relatively defenseless in Korean courts.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
It's not about what is fair, it's about maximizing profit. And if a company can earn money from both consumers and producers, why not? This is what unrestricted capitalism is like. IIRC there were some companies that got a slap on the wrist (it was something like Uber or a food delivery company) for charging both consumers and producers a commission, which is illegal (I don't remember the legalese term).

by jonnat 5y ago

mrpopo 5y ago

If anything, customers should be suing ISPs every time they don't get the expected bandwidth. It's the ISP that fails to deliver according to the contract.

dwighttk 5y ago
I bet there is fine print that says they are delivering exactly according to the contract
- xoa 5y ago
  You're certainly right, and the specific term here for what consumers should, but generally don't, have is a "Service Level Agreement" (SLA). This is pretty standard for business links and nearly anything at all at the datacenter level, if you ever subscribe to a whole line at a colo you'll probably see that. SLAs tend to spell out not just maximum sustained bandwidth, but 90/95/97/99%, uptime, what if any burst bandwidth is available, any latency guarantees, etc. All of these are different measures that cost different amounts to hit at any given level, and SLAs spell out exactly what is being paid for in numbers that can be monitored fairly easily. If I could make one simple change to the home broadband market, it would be insisting on a standardized big number consumer level SLA. I certainly don't expect residential rates to cover the same 99.97% or worst case minimum that business class does, that's a major part of what higher end connections are paying for. But whatever they do offer should be transparent, fixed for contract period and measurable. ISPs should by law be required to spell out not just the top line bandwidth level, but also 75%/95% guarantees over a standard time (day/month maybe) and what the worst case guaranteed minimum is. This wouldn't be some big centralized bureaucratic decision about implementations or what numbers have to be hit, but rather merely make sure the market has clear information so customers can compare and ISPs could be held to their promises. Energy Star consumer information might be some guide to layout, but I think something like that would be low hanging fruit. Also to be clear, a distinction can and should be made for intra-network vs inter-network, and both should be accounted for. Obviously an ISP has the most control and is the most responsible for how traffic traverses their own network to their edges, but ISPs do have some responsibility (affected by size/location) for their peering agreements too. If they're purposefully choking that it's on them, though small/remote ISPs may be at a disadvantage in negotiations there which should ideally have some eyes on it.
  - jimmydorry 5y ago
    I absolutely agree, however national or even regional level transparency reports are bullshit. It needs to be at the exchange / node level. The same ISP will have different levels of service between cities and suburbs.
- c12 5y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised. I have a gigabit connection and the contract specifically states that they guarantee a maximum throughput of 400Mbit at peak times.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Guaranteeing a maximum doesn't sound like much of a guarantee.
    - david422 5y ago
      "We guarantee our performance will be subpar"
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    It's like the geico commercials: you could save up to x% on your car insurance if you switch to Geico. It says nothing, there are two weasel word exceptions in there.
    - names_are_hard 5y ago
      There's another weasel phrase in there: "Or more" (Switching to Geico could save you 15% _or more_) So it could save you nothing, or it could save you 15%, or even more. Basically we have no idea what it'll save you, if anything.
  - zsmi 5y ago
    Hopefully you mistyped and meant "they guarantee a minimum throughput of 400Mbit at peak times." Otherwise 0Mbit is consistent with the terms of the contract, which is probably exactly what the ISP was going for.
- petre 5y ago
  That and also 'reasonable use' clauses.
vlan0 5y ago
I agree, but there still need to be constraints. For instance, if I have a 1Gb symmetrical connection, it's probably still unreasonable for me to expect 1Gb connecting to my buddy's 1Gb 3k miles away.
- geocar 5y ago
  If you and your buddy use the same ISP, no it is not unreasonable.
  - vlan0 5y ago
    Right, that's likely doable on the same ISP, even 3k miles away. It does highlight a philosophical question I raised in another comment. What exactly are consumers purchasing from last mile ISPs? Is it 1Gb to anywhere on the providers network? 1Gb to the nearest CDN/Internet exchange? I don't think there is a good answer for this. But it's important to think about when we talk about ISPs reaching their hand towards large content providers.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
zakki 5y ago
Usually the contract cover the bandwidth on last mile. The bandwidth for the internet is shared between all customers.
xxs 5y ago
>suing ISPs every time they don't get the expected bandwidt this is beyond flawed, unless you consider all possible bandwidth, not just Netflix being slow. The latter can be entirely an issue on Netflix side.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

moreira 5y ago

It really is wild. ISPs have been overselling "unlimited" connections for forever, and being paid for it, but when their customers actually want to use literally the service they paid for, _legally_, it's somehow wrong? I guess that's the thing with Netflix though, it's torrent-like traffic, but legal, so there's no excuse to stop it and they have to come up with something. "oh they're generating explosive traffic that's not good"

Proven 5y ago
You seem to spend too much time on leftist web sites. First, they aren't being paid for unlimited. Do you think that $39.99 or $199.99 per month can cover the cost of transferring unlimited amount of data to another continent? Of course, it doesn't. Somebody pays $39.99 to download 10 emails, another customer runs BitTorrent 24 by 7 consuming TB's of bandwidth for the same price. Second, they don't want to sell "unlimited" - they could make more money by selling differentiated services.
tw04 5y ago
The thing that's most ridiculous about this is that the bandwidth is essentially "free" for SK telecom. They sit a netflix caching server in their network and the traffic never leaves. Other than the cost of switch ports (which are dirt cheap relatively speaking) they have absolutely 0 overhead beyond power and cooling for the netflix box which again with their user count is a rounding error. I'm not sure if the lawmakers are ignorant, bought and paid for, or a little of both but it would be refreshing if one of them took 30 seconds and applied a little critical thinking to the situation.
- piaste 5y ago
  > The thing that's most ridiculous about this is that the bandwidth is essentially "free" for SK telecom. They sit a netflix caching server in their network and the traffic never leaves. Wouldn't that require them to MITM the Netflix traffic, which I would hope is under TLS?
  - namibj 5y ago

Proven 5y ago

Yep. It's even more impressive how the average HN reader can't even comprehend this comment (or can, but somehow manages to insist on their wrong, socialist views) and continues to argue in favor of "network neutrality", even though no two users or service providers are the same. If Netflix should pay $10 mil a month to Korea's Internet providers, why not HN? If HN should pay less than Netflix, why should the user who only visits HN pay the same Internet access fee as the one who constantly watches Netflix?

anoncow 5y ago

These ISPs have no shame. Have they forgotten their role so much that they did not wake up even when they were filing a case?

thedougd 5y ago

Time to bring back ISP shaming. Netflix would notify Verizon users in the app that Verizon's slow peering was degrading their watch experience. https://bgr.com/general/netflix-vs-verizon-network/ https://bgr.com/general/netflix-vs-verizon-network/

c12 5y ago
Wasn't this what fast.com was created for?
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Fast.com will let you test the idea yourself (if you already know it exists) but it will not proactively notify you otherwise.
jandrese 5y ago
This was one of the first wins for IPv6. I had a Hurricane Electric tunnel on my FiOS link and was able to bypass the bottleneck that Verizon set up for Netflix. Now Netflix blocks Hurricane Electric endpoints and FiOS still doesn't support IPv6. We're nearing the 10 year anniversary of that "coming soon" FAQ entry on their webpage.

Aerroon 5y ago

This seems like a really popular technique in politics. Frame the problem in a way that makes it seem unjust regardless what the wider implications are. Online ads and data vacuuming is often presented in a similar fashion. Your browser goes to the advertiser and requests the ad. The advertiser asks for your data. Your browser sends the data to the advertiser. And the way we frame this is that advertisers are stealing our data. Once a system is opaque and automated enough it doesn't seem to matter how it really works. Netflix is a big entity, therefore we blame Netflix. If Netflix didn't exist then the traffic surge wouldn't exist, therefore Netflix should pay.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

xxs 5y ago

It's quite common datacenter prices to incl. bandwidth and data. Netflix/youtube cases it's the content providers that server the traffic, so most of it is generated by them. The client requests are tiny in comparison.

Freestyler_3 5y ago
Lets say you have a website in datacenter A /You pay datacenter for bandwith etc. Person pulls your website /Person pays cablecompany Z for bandwith Now you have to pay Cablecompany Z for the data.
- xxs 5y ago
  But that's not the case in the article "Netflix began using =SK's dedicated= line starting 2018 to deliver increasingly larger amounts of data-heavy, high-definition video content to viewers in Korea from servers in Japan and Hong Kong". Admittedly the article is light on the details, yet I'd presume the line has been created exclusively for Netflix, there is no info if there was an agreement between the parties. There is no reference to the Seoul District Court decision, either. "Internet"/data between major tube providers (ISP) is very different than paying cable company X for end user access. Some just have agreements to carry each other traffics and some pay to carry their traffic[0]: [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network
nix23 5y ago
Lets compare it with food, if you (client) would not eat so much the producer (server) would not produce as much, no server produces traffic without a consumer.
- xxs 5y ago
  I have replied to a sibling's comment ISP agreements are nothing like that.

lrem 5y ago

A decade ago I was with an ISP who took a stand for "Google should pay us for the priviledge of having our users watch YouTube". I believe I wasn't the only one who decided that's the last straw and moved to an ISP that wasn't rejecting peering based on greed.

pepoluan 5y ago
Sounds like an ISP in a monopolistic situation. When there are alternatives, ISPs would bend over backwards for what customers want. That are not colluding like a cartel, of course.
- lrem 5y ago
  Thankfully that was a market with good competition. They might have hoped to capitalise on some of that anti-American, anti-BigTech sentiment. But everyone I knew who used them was pissed at these shenanigans. Hilariously enough, I switched to a former governmental monopoly.

perryizgr8 5y ago

> The content providers are not generating the traffic, the users are Huh?? I am not serving terabytes of movies from my home connection. Netflix is.

lowdest 5y ago
Netflix has no association with this ISP, you do. It's your choice to request Netflix streams for delivery through the ISP. Blaming Netflix for this would be like an apartment building blaming Amazon for delivering too many boxes to the mail room.
Arrath 5y ago
The users are paying the ISP to have that content served to them through their connection. Is the ISP mad that more users are using more of their promised service allowance? Too bad, maybe they shouldn't oversell their networks.
cortesoft 5y ago
The traffic is generated by a user making a request for the movie. It isn’t like Netflix is just sending movies to users at random.

dahart 5y ago

Don’t miss the past paragraph in the article, “In the United States, Netflix has been paying a fee to broadband provider Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O) for over seven years for faster streaming speeds. https://reut.rs/2Y8wOzb” https://reut.rs/2Y8wOzb”

ralfd 5y ago
Two points: 1. In 2014 Netflix made similar deals with AT&T and Verizon. 2. It is not extortion by the ISP, "pay up or else". But Netflix was simply building up its own CDN-capabilities. They ditched Akamai and Limelight and for that they needed their own server endpoints into the networks. https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2014/02/heres-comcast-netflix-deal-structured-numbers.html https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2014/02/heres-comcast-net...

kijin 5y ago

The framing gets a pass because the majority of "explosive traffic" comes from foreign companies. Google and Netflix have no voice in the Korean lawmaking process. When they go to court, they fall right into the trap of the framing that local companies have already set up. South Korea is well known for having fast internet, but the internet is only fast within the small country. International connectivity has always been crappy, and getting crappier every year as telcos focus on legal avenues instead of actually laying enough undersea cables to meet the demand. In the past, most Koreans only visited Korean sites because of the language barrier; that's no longer true. But it's going to take a lot of time and money to remedy years of neglect in international connectivity. Especially SK Broadband, who IMO has been the most complacent in this department among the Big 3 telcos, precisely because of their huge domestic market share. Where is the money going to come from? Obviously not by cutting executive bonuses. SK Broadband seems to think that they can extort it out of Google and Netflix who, despite their global prominence, are relatively defenseless in Korean courts.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

It's not about what is fair, it's about maximizing profit. And if a company can earn money from both consumers and producers, why not? This is what unrestricted capitalism is like. IIRC there were some companies that got a slap on the wrist (it was something like Uber or a food delivery company) for charging both consumers and producers a commission, which is illegal (I don't remember the legalese term).