South Korea treats internet bandwidth like a physical commodity
Business
While most nations treat web traffic as a free-flowing resource, Seoul forces tech giants to pay by the gigabyte, similar to how utilities charge for water or gas.
In most of the world, the internet operates on a handshake deal where networks swap traffic for free. South Korea upended this in 2021 by regulating bandwidth as a metered commodity. If a company like Netflix or Google sends ten times more data than they receive, they are hit with fees ranging from $0.001 to $0.005 per gigabyte. This turns the digital void into a physical chokepoint, where every high-definition stream has a literal invoice attached to it.