Smart City, Net Neutrality, and Antitrust: findings from Korea

The smart city is the culmination of the most advanced ICT technology applicable to our daily lives but it is easy to overlook the core infrastructure that make such city possible: the Internet. And without a doubt, the 5G Internet network will serve as the backbone infrastructure that ties in all the technologies that go into the smart city. Given the important role that this network will play within the smart city infrastructure, the network neutrality debate warrants a deep look as it may ultimately affect how the smart city will distribute the cost of staying connected to the Internet. Today, much if not most of the traffic on the Internet is taken up by the Over-the Top (OTT) service providers such as Google, Youtube and such phenomenon has caused much controversy and debate over whether or not the principle of network neutrality should still be enforced on the Internet over run by a few services. But looking at a recent court ruling in the case of ‘Facebook v Korea Communication Commission’(2019), where the various ISPs in Korea replaced their non-settlement of interconnection fee with the Sending-Party-Network-Pays (SPNP) policy, it is clear that instead of the intended effect of fair pricing model for the OTT service providers, the loss of net neutrality caused undesirable side effects. This paper proposes to discuss the relationship between interconnection fee and net neutrality as well as antitrust policies against OTT service providers. While this debate is still on-going, the authors of this paper would like to emphasize the importance of net neutrality as ex ante regulation and antitrust laws as ex post regulation to minimize the undesirable side effects but still allow the free flow of data at the same time.