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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

A lot of commentors here are defending that netflix shouldn't pay data charges.

I don't know how internet prices works for big players, but from the perspective of a little guy, it seems kinda reasonable that netlflix pay, doesn't it?

I mean, why am I paying for bandwidth on AWS? Shouldn't that be paid for by the downloading party?

If I download something from my neighbors computer over a p2p app, then we both still pay for our internet connection, and depending on the contract, we pay by the byte.

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> why am I paying for bandwidth on AWS?

That’s a great question; it’s because cloud providers have conditioned you to believe their rent-seeking is necessary.

See Cloudflare R2 vs AWS S3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28702997

That, though, is exactly how it works. Netflix pays for their traffic and infrastructure, the SK clients pay for access to internet for a given bandwidth and SK pays for the infrastructure and interconnections needed to give their clients what they paid for.

Netflix doesn't get free interconnections.

  > why am I paying for bandwidth on AWS?

Because when you signed up for services on AWS, you agreed to pay for egress and ingress bandwidth delivered at very high speeds.

When I signed up for my ISP, I agreed to pay for a rate of speed that was sold to me as "unlimited" with some restrictions, but none that even came close to resembling "don't download video too much".

It also ignores the value Netflix provides. My parents chose to buy faster internet service than they otherwise would have purchased because of Netflix. If Netflix was not in the picture, they would have purchased the cheapest plan available. It's not a fairness failure, it's a marketing failure.

Netflix DO pay data charges, on hosting their own infrastructure. Probably unthinkable amounts. It certainly isn't up to the hoster to cover an ISPs costs for the people access their service.

You pay for bandwidth on AWS. In the Netflix scenario, the ISPs sitting between your service and your customers would be demanding that you pay them for using their bandwidth.

The only difference between you and Netflix is that they are AWS with all of the interconnect and overhead costs, while you get to pay a third party to abstract all of that complexity away for what is essentially a management fee.

> why am I paying for bandwidth on AWS? Shouldn't that be paid for by the downloading party?

you're paying for it because it costs money to provide bandwidth on both ends, and AWS is just shunting the cost onto you itemized.

Netflix, believe it or not, also charges for the bandwidth it uses, but it hides it unitemized into the subscription fee, and in sufficient quantities that when averaged across all it's subscribers, they come out at least breakeven.

Somewhat unrelated, but your point about costs coming out breakeven when averaged over all users made me realize that this move by SK makes as much sense as Netflix suing an ISP because their customers consume a disproportionately large amount of Netflix' bandwidth. The ISP's role in facilitating the usage of Netflix bandwidth would be the same as Netflix faciliting use of SK's bandwidth in this case.

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