Image: ReutersSouth Korea’s parliament saw heated debate on Friday over proposed legislation to make global content providers such as Netflix and Alphabet’s Google pay South Korean network fees.
The hearing is expected to be concluded late on Friday but the proposal is still seen as some way away from moving forward to the next stage of the legislative process. “It risks the collapse of domestic content providers while trying to protect a small number of domestic internet service providers,” said Jung Chung-rae, head of the parliament committee overseeing the issue.
Liz Chung, a director at Netflix’s South Korean unit, said her company was looking for ways to handle surging traffic. It costs money to establish and maintain subsea cables and infrastructure that bring data from one place to another and the exploding popularity of global video content has raised the costs of bringing data stored overseas, experts said.