🔥 In this 'Hot Item', Kyung Sin Park (aka ‘KS Park’), Professor at Korea University Law School and co-founder and Director of Open Net Korea, & the internet lab discuss the recent joint statement by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) and the Korea Telecommunications Operators Association (KTOA) on network fees.

📌Hot Item Highlights
⏲️[00:00] Intro
⏲️[00:39] KS Park
⏲️[10:11] Wrap-up & Outro

🗣️ [Network fees] have really suppressed the development of small to mid-sized content providers in Korea. That has not been addressed at all by the joint letter by KTOA and ETNO.

🗣️ The more people choose [specific] content, the more the content’s author has to pay to the telecom operator. It’s basically a taxation on speaking online, if speaking includes making available videos, audio, or files, etc. That's what's happening in Korea.

🗣️ [In 2021]: TeleGeography, found that the transit fee in Seoul was eight times more than London and ten times more than Frankfurt, and you can see the impact on the Internet ecosystem.

🗣️ On the argument of payments being imposed only on ‘large traffic generators’: lots of people make a living on those platforms (...) [which] are bound to shift the burden to users, and that will suppress growth of individuals and SMEs.

➡️ KTOA-ETNO Joint Statement on Network Fees
➡️ Comparisons of transit fee costs: see here and here