Twitch announces that it’s exiting the South Korean market, where it reports internet fees are ten times higher than anywhere else in world. Ultimately, the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is…
SK’s whole economy is weird… it’s dominated by monopolies/oligopolies propped up by its former military dictatorship. While this has been a very successful strategy towards extreme growth on the export market, the chaebols are legally allowed to kinda do whatever they want to crush all local competition.
So, it’s not surprising that Twitch, as an outsider, just got told “fuck you bandwidth is 10x the price for you”. The whole system is specifically setup to allow, say, SK to spin up its own streaming platform which will be vertically integrated with its telco business and given fair/preferential pricing.
Even in the US that’d be an antitrust lawsuit or 10, in South Korea it’s just Wednesday.
SK’s whole economy is weird… it’s dominated by monopolies/oligopolies propped up by its former military dictatorship. While this has been a very successful strategy towards extreme growth on the export market, the chaebols are legally allowed to kinda do whatever they want to crush all local competition.
So, it’s not surprising that Twitch, as an outsider, just got told “fuck you bandwidth is 10x the price for you”. The whole system is specifically setup to allow, say, SK to spin up its own streaming platform which will be vertically integrated with its telco business and given fair/preferential pricing.
Even in the US that’d be an antitrust lawsuit or 10, in South Korea it’s just Wednesday.