Network Non-neutrality Debate: An Economic Analysis

Abstract

This paper studies the economic utilities and the quality of service (QoS) in a two-sided non-neutral market where Internet service providers (ISPs) charge content providers (CPs) for the content delivery. We propose new models on a two-sided market which involves a CP, an ISP, end users and advertisers. The CP may have either the subscription revenue model (charging end users) or the advertisement revenue model (charging advertisers). We formulate the interactions between the ISP and the CP as a noncooperative game problem for the former and an optimization problem for the latter. Our analysis shows that the revenue model of the CP plays a significant role in a non-neutral Internet. With the subscription model, both the ISP and the CP receive better (or worse) utilities as well as QoS in the presence of side payment at the same time. However, with the advertisement model, the side payment impedes the CP from investing on its contents.

15 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Application Neutrality and a Paradox of Side Payments

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Power-Law Distributions in a Two-sided Market and Net Neutrality
• Welfare Analysis of Network Neutrality Regulation
• Side-payment profitability and interacting eyeball ISPs under convex demand-response modeling congestion-sensitive applications