Kyungsin Park (Professor at Korea University Law School / Executive Director, Open Net Korea)
These days, the idea of making internet companies like Google, Naver, and Kakao pay “network usage fees” is spreading like a trend. Claims are proliferating that in the 5G era, network operators should be able to sell “high-speed” internet to internet companies at premium prices, or that they should charge domestic access fees to foreign internet companies.
The internet has been regarded as a tool for political and economic democratization because of its character as a “participatory medium.” It promised that even powerless individuals could become producers of mass communication, able to appeal to the public simultaneously like broadcasting or newspapers, with public opinion and industry forming through their “participation.”
How is such an internet—where everyone can communicate with everyone else all at once—physically possible? It’s impossible for billions of terminals to directly connect to every other terminal. The revolution of the internet was making it possible for everyone to communicate with each other without doing so. How? By agreeing to become messengers for one another. To enable communication between A and Z, many terminals—B, C, D, E, F, G, and so on—made a promise to relay information in sequence, like people forming a line to pass buckets of water from a distant source to extinguish a fire. The internet’s revolution was that if every terminal faithfully fulfilled its duty of passing information received from a neighboring terminal to another neighboring terminal in a different direction, then everyone could communicate with everyone else—C with W, L with H.
However, this required another principle: they also promised not to charge money for communication with their neighboring terminals. If they had tried to charge money from senders or receivers like postal services or telephones, senders and receivers would have had to pay costs based on how many intermediate terminals they passed through, and those costs would have had to be distributed to each intermediate terminal—the transaction costs of settling these alone would have collapsed the internet. Ultimately, the principle was established that information would be forwarded to the next person free of charge, regardless of where it came from, where it was going, or what its content was. This principle—where everyone contributes to relaying everyone else’s information while not charging each other delivery fees—is network neutrality. Not charging for information delivery is equivalent to not charging for faster delivery or more stable delivery, which is the better-known expression of network neutrality: the “no prioritization” principle. The democratic nature of the internet began with this participatory foundation where everyone freely contributes to relaying each other’s information.
Thanks to this, the internet became an ocean of free information. If I had to pay information delivery fees whenever someone from another continent accessed my website and took information, I wouldn’t have tried to post information on my website for free. Especially, receiving other people’s information to post it so that others could take it would have been unthinkable. The reason we can use Daum Mail, Naver Search, KakaoTalk, YouTube, and Facebook for free is entirely thanks to network neutrality.
However, as time passed, companies emerged that intermediated connections between parties and charged money for it. These are network operators. Network operators came to control connections between many terminals, to the point where now, if you go from A to Z passing through 30 terminals, they might control about 10 of them. Based on this, network operators began arguing that “even if not for the entire information delivery route, we should be paid delivery fees since we’re responsible for a substantial portion.” This is a completely different concept from access fees for expanding wire capacity so that large amounts of information can be exchanged at once.
This is what Korean network operators call “network usage fees,” but this expression itself doesn’t exist abroad. If we must find a corresponding term, it would be called a “termination fee,” meaning a charge collected from senders for “(by the network operator) delivering information to end consumers.” Telephone network operators charge this to each other, but it has been taboo on the internet.
The concept of “network usage fees” directly contradicts the internet’s operating principles and ultimately paralyzes the internet’s function as a participatory medium. If domestic network operators make money that way, foreign network operators will also try to collect “network usage fees” from Korean users or network operators for delivering information to the Korean border. Worse yet, major information providers will try to charge only when domestic users take information, and the “ocean of information” will mysteriously evaporate only in Korea.
The above article was contributed to Hankyoreh. (2018.11.19.)
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