Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge

[Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>]

On 10/10/21 23:42, Doug Barton wrote:

> I didn't say income tax. Corporate taxes are considered an expense by 
> the corporation paying them. Like all other expenses, they are 
> factored into the cost of goods/services sold.

Ah, yes, agreed. I thought you meant something else...


> First, I'm not saying "should." I'm saying that given the market 
> economics, having the content providers who use "a lot" of bandwidth 
> do something to offset those costs to the ISPs might be the best/least 
> bad option. Whether "something" is a local cache box, peering, money, 
> or <other> is something I think that the market should determine.

But all the major content providers do this already. They come to 
exchange points. They provide caches. What more do we want them to do?

Content providers that don't do these things don't generally tend to be 
popular, in which case, we don't have to worry about them flooding 
backbone links.

I am almost sure Netflix have some degree of presence in South Korea. 
What I'm not sure about is what else SK wants them to do beyond that.


> And to answer Matthew's question, I don't know what "a lot" is. I 
> think the market should determine that as well.

Hehe, free markets determine the fundamental principles through price 
and competition, which is why we are in this mess to begin with. Unless 
you want "government" to make the determination :-).


> And for the record, not only have I never worked for an ISP, I was 
> saying all the way back in the late '90s that the oversubscription 
> business model (which almost always includes punishing users who 
> actually use their bandwidth) is inherently unfair to the customers, 
> and when the Internet becomes more pervasive in daily life will come 
> back to bite them in the ass. I was laughed at for being hopelessly 
> naive, not understanding how the bandwidth business works, etc.

Totally agreed. However, we are sort of forced to use this model because 
of the underlying technology. Whenever a finite resource has to be 
shared amongst several people, there has to be some way to manage that 
sharing.

Maybe if Internet services were circuit-switched, we wouldn't have this 
problem. But then again, we wouldn't have an Internet like we do today 
either.

Mark.