Basically, ISPs in Korea charge services extra fees based on the amount of traffic they generate.

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

Of course while Netflix can raise prices to cover those fees, Twitch is free, so it can’t do the same.

I can see both sides of the argument here, but it is strange to me that the cost does not fall on consumers instead of the producers—the U.S. has had bandwidth caps for users for a several years.

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

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

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

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

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

I think that would decimate their user numbers, which is a bad deal for the streamers too since they make money on sponsorships/ads and based on audience size. Hard to grow an audience when folks have to pay for the service. No idea how much of an average size streamer's income is based on donations on stream compared to brand deals. I wouldn't expect the average user to both pay for a sub to twitch, and also donate to the streamers.

I won't pretend to know what Twitch knows, but watching for free is definitely integral to how Twitch acquires users.

Doesn’t shutting off the service decimate their numbers more?

That's not obvious. If the pay-to-watch version of Twitch isn't viable, it will have no streamers and no users, but it will cost more than the we-no-longer-exist version.

A fixed price tier cannot cover the full cost of that user's variable stream usage.

Twitch is unable to charge per hr streamed - nobody would accept that pricing, esp. if it was originally free.

Removing twitch from korea is the best move, since koreans are the ones losing out - which hopefully as a democracy, they elect someone to change this sort of lobbying from the ISP industry.

It might work short-term, but without a free tier, can they get enough new customers to replace subscriber loss over time? Otherwise they'll just slowly bleed subscribers until it's no longer profitable to run transit to and CDNs in Korea.

Twitch's market share in Korea is very small. Domestic streaming services like Afreeca are the dominant player. If I had to guess, Twitch doesn't have enough users in Korea for a paywalled system to turn things profitable.

According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539167#38539479 Twitch is the most popular streaming service in Korea, just slightly ahead of Afreeca.

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

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

I'm going purely off memory, but I recall vaguely that in Korea there are charges for the "push" side of network use, as well as the "pull" side. I can't recall if this is a government thing, or an ISP thing, or a confluence of both working together. I seem to recall Netflix becoming frustrated about this at some point.

Maybe someone can find more info, since I'm replying on a device that makes actually looking this up a little tricky.

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

It's common for consumer internet in many countries. What's different in Korea, dominance?

Market dominance is probably the reason.

Canada had crown ISPs that offered unlimited data plans, so telcos has to do the same to compete and the idea of a fixed cap internet plan is rodiculous.

When mobile data became popular there were no crown telcos anymore(other than SaskTel) so the prices started ridiculously high and were never brought down(other than in Saskatchewan)

> the idea of a fixed cap internet plan is rodiculous.

Why? As far as I understand in Canada there are genuine costs incurred per extra bit of data transferred.

Legal liability costs, peak congestion costs, etc...

It may be a very very tiny amount per bit, but when multiplied hundreds of billions of times, they become noticeable costs.