https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211019/08235847773/british-telecom-wants-netflix-to-pay-tax-simply-because-squid-game-is-popular.shtml

For years telecom executives, jealous of internet services and ad revenue, have demanded that content and services companies pay them an extra toll for no reason. You saw this most pointedly during the net neutrality fracas, when AT&T routinely insisted Google should pay it additional money for no coherent reason. Telecom execs have also repeatedly claimed that Netflix should pay them more money just because. Basically, telecoms have tried to use their gatekeeper and political power to offload network investment costs to somebody else, and have spent literally the last twenty years using a range of incoherent arguments to try and justify it with varying degrees of success.

While these efforts quieted down for a few years, they've popped back up recently thanks to, of all things, Netflix's Squid Game. In South Korea, ISPs have demanded that Netflix pay them more money because of the streaming demand the popular show places on their networks. As we noted then this makes no coherent sense, given ISPs build their networks to handle peak capacity load; what specific type of traffic causes that load doesn't particularly matter. It's just not how network engineering or common sense work.