Ok, I'm just trying to understand this: Korea passed a law that increased operating costs for twitch (and similar entities, twitch is just the relevant case here). Twitch responded by reducing those costs by reducing the resolution, which seems reasonable. Then they were told they couldn't do that, so they've decided to simply cease operating in Korea as it would be even more expensive (presumably to the extent that they believed there was no possible path to ever being profitable).
And now they're being told that they will be fined for not operating in Korea at all?
Is that correct?
The logical equivalence would be a government passing a law that said "Farmers must pay trucking companies more than the maximum profit on an apple, for every apple they ship, even though the trucking companies are already being paid by the recipient of the apples. Not only are you not allowed to ship fewer apples, you also can't decide to stop being an apple farmer." (I'm not sure if the Korean law also prevents twitch/apple farmers from increasing prices to cover the cost of those fees, but that would track the rest of the nonsense)
The article mentions also the obligation to refunds, so presumably users already subscribed to a service with a given quality, then reducing the quality.
This is not different from Prime adding ads to paying customers who signed up to the service with the implied promise there were none.
That was what I meant by "not allowed to sell/ship less".
I guess this is a novel new way around trade agreements - just add costs that only meaningfully apply to external products (e.g. "a carbon tax for all products that travel more than 6000 miles from site of manufacture or farming to the location of sale or final customer delivery" - sure that doesn't say it's an import duty, but it sure as hell means nothing from the US is subject to the tax in the US, but anything from china would be covered)
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Ok, I'm just trying to understand this: Korea passed a law that increased operating costs for twitch (and similar entities, twitch is just the relevant case here). Twitch responded by reducing those costs by reducing the resolution, which seems reasonable. Then they were told they couldn't do that, so they've decided to simply cease operating in Korea as it would be even more expensive (presumably to the extent that they believed there was no possible path to ever being profitable).
And now they're being told that they will be fined for not operating in Korea at all?
Is that correct?
The logical equivalence would be a government passing a law that said "Farmers must pay trucking companies more than the maximum profit on an apple, for every apple they ship, even though the trucking companies are already being paid by the recipient of the apples. Not only are you not allowed to ship fewer apples, you also can't decide to stop being an apple farmer." (I'm not sure if the Korean law also prevents twitch/apple farmers from increasing prices to cover the cost of those fees, but that would track the rest of the nonsense)
The article mentions also the obligation to refunds, so presumably users already subscribed to a service with a given quality, then reducing the quality.
This is not different from Prime adding ads to paying customers who signed up to the service with the implied promise there were none.
Seems like they should just drop the pretense and send them a bill labeled "because we want it"
You forgot the bit where they also got fined for reducing the resolution. But otherwise, yeah, that seems accurate.
The phrase "heads I win, tails you lose" comes to mind.
That was what I meant by "not allowed to sell/ship less".
I guess this is a novel new way around trade agreements - just add costs that only meaningfully apply to external products (e.g. "a carbon tax for all products that travel more than 6000 miles from site of manufacture or farming to the location of sale or final customer delivery" - sure that doesn't say it's an import duty, but it sure as hell means nothing from the US is subject to the tax in the US, but anything from china would be covered)
Except in this case, they aren't even charging for apples, they're supported entirely by advertising