back to article South Korea sets site reliability engineering standards for Big Tech

South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT has offered Big Tech some advice on how to make their services suitably resilient, and added an obligation to notify users – in Korean - when they fail. The guidelines apply to Google, Meta (parent company of Facebook), Netflix, Naver, Kakao and Wavve. All have been told to improve …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "contribute fairly to network costs"

    I still don't understand that argument.

    To connect to the Internet, I pay my provider a monthly due. That is supposed to cover my bandwidth usage.

    El Reg has a connection, and it pays its provider as well (probably more than I do). That covers its bandwidth usage.

    Where is the unfair part of all of this ?

    If it's because there's a carrier between me and El Reg, well it's up to my provider and El Reg's provider to manage the situation. El Reg is not supposed to pay every provider along the way.

    This is nonsense.

    1. jmch Silver badge

      Re: "contribute fairly to network costs"

      "Where is the unfair part of all of this ?"

      The providers promise their customers unlimited data volume at a maximum speed which is only theoretical, and they also all slash their headline prices to undercut each other. At the same time, consumers are consuming more and more streaming audio and video at higher and higher quality

      Providers are over-promising and underdelivering... but also, following a couple of decades of this cycle, consumer expectation for what is reasonably priced bandwidth is now out of line with what it actually costs to provide that service + infrastructure maintenance and further development. ISPs need to increase their prices to realistically price their service instead of asking content providers to pay extra. But none of them is willing to go first for fear of a mass customer exodus. And one can't blame them either because the second they do you can bet customers, including right here on El Reg, will be up in arms and complaining about crappy service and cost increases.

  2. Martin Summers Silver badge

    This and the paying carriers for bandwidth is just nuts. What are they trying to achieve here other than make themselves look good and cover themselves in glory to their citizens? Simultaneously they are making themselves look foolish to the rest of the world that know the private arrangements between citizens and business for provision of services like this are no business of the government. They will keep pushing for more bizzare rules if companies bow down to this stuff. There's regulatory stuff that of course is just the cost of doing business in a country, fair enough. These kind of things are a step too far though. What would it take for big tech to just up and leave though I wonder.

  3. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    Facepalm

    This seems stupid

    I have the utmost faith that the big tech companies are doing their best to maintain uptime since downtime costs money. It seems highly unlikely that some government agency will have more familiarity with site reliability principles than companies with deep expertise and a vested interest in keeping their services up. Actually notifying the users of downtime in their native language does seem fair, however.

  4. EricB123 Bronze badge

    Multinational American Companies?

    I'm staying out of the argument of who pays for the increased bandwidth, but I can certainly sympathize with the Korean government about informing Koreans about outages IN KOREAN. As an American expat, whenever I have to deal with a so called American "International Company" about anything I run into problems.

    Like I must send the document to America on 8 1/2" x 11" sheets of paper. They say they have never heard of A4 paper. Then I call my American bank to change my phone number. Their entry system only accepts "+1" as a country code. Or I need to send three utility bills that I receive in the mail each month as proof of residence. "No, no mail here" I reply. They try to start an argument that every country has mail.

    Out of sight, out of mind I suppose.

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