I don't agree with SK "Internet tax" concept but isn't it sweet that an Amazon-owned company suffers this end? Yeah, I'm looking at you, AWS egress prices and NAT-gw.
For the uninformed: AWS has pricing on NAT gateways that can only really be described as predatory. I personally saw a massive bill this year for sending data to and from a bucket in the same data center. In other words. I have a service. It’s in us-west-2. I have it sending a bunch of data back and forth between it and a S3 bucket, in the exact same data center. Unless you have some arbitrary checkbox checked in AWS, which absolutely should be checked by default and AWS has no literal reason to have it unchecked bedsides scammy, predatory practices, AWS will send you a massive bill to send bits entirely within their datacenter.
It might be “trivial” but in my experience most engineers at these companies are too busy trying to look good in order to either survive the next cut (particularly egregious at Amazon) or get promoted, and fixing this does neither.
As Charlie Munger said: show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.
Makes sense to me. Highways have toll roads and freight trucks pay more than cars.
The same concept can apply here. Twitch, Netflix and others make up the lion's share of bandwidth use, dwarfing everything else. They should be paying something to improve capacity and contribute to maintaining the infrastructure.
The toll is already paid by the ISP customers and their monthly fees.
Now, I would never defend FAANG or similar, but as I see this is just that ISPs would like really much to get money from both sides at the same time.
If they were really into this, they could offer very cheap plans at 3/5$ per month with capped data. The difference? If you are in SK or similar would be on Netflix side, in other countries you would pay a premium for an uncapped connection.
Road tolls are a usage-based tax on top of what is already covered by the taxpayer. You don't pay it if you don't use it.
Factories that use a lot of electricity will contract directly with a energy seller instead of paying utility rates, because of the variability of peak period charges. This is apparently what Netflix did (pre-pay for bandwidth), as they dropped their case against SK Telecom.
It's not economically viable to charge Twitch, which transmits thousands of petabytes per month the same amount as a business that sends emails or handles online shopping.
