Karimi & Associates Law Firm presents according to The Reuters:
A South Korean internet service provider named SK Broadband has filed a lawsuit against Netflix claiming that Netflix has to pay for costs from increased network traffic and maintenance work due to the considerable increase of viewers of the U.S. content provider’s newly published content named Squid Game. According to the court documents, SK Broadband estimated the network usage fee Netflix needed to pay was about 22.9 million dollars in 2020.
Previously, a South Korean court ordered that Netflix shall “reasonably” give something in return to the internet service provider for network usage. Netflix has stated that it will review SK Broadband’s claim, and negotiate to explore ways in the meantime to work with SK Broadband to ensure customers are not affected.
Netflix’s data traffic which has to be handled by SK has been increased up to 24 times more than it was in May 2018, equivalent to 1.2 trillion bits of data processed per second as of September, according to SK Broadband.
Ruling party legislator Kim Sang-hee said on Wednesday that out of South Korea’s top 10 data traffic generators, 78.5% of the traffic came from foreign content providers, up from 73.1% a year earlier, with “Google-YouTube and Netflix that account for the majority turning a blind eye to network usage fees”.