Net Neutrality, Exclusivity Contracts, and Internet Fragmentation

Net neutrality and the value chain for video

Net neutrality has, for a number of years, been a topic of often heated discussion in the Internet and telecom community. The issue was put firmly on the agenda by Tim Wu in his famous paper (Wu, 2003) following the discussion on a number of net-neutrality related issues by other authors (e.g. Lemley and Lessig, 2001). Since then, net neutrality has been analyzed extensively in academia and in ...

Exclusivity, Contingent Control Rights, and the Design of Internet Portal Alliances July 2009

We explore the relationship between exclusivity and the use of verifiable performance measures to allocate state-contingent control rights using a sample of over 100 Internet portal alliance contracts. We find that the stronger the exclusivity arrangement between the parties, the more likely are contingent control rights to be incorporated into alliance contracts. In particular we find evidence...

Monitoring quality of Internet access services in the context of net neutrality Draft BEREC report

Network neutrality debate and ISP inter-relations: traffic exchange, revenue sharing, and disconnection threat

The network neutrality debate originally stems from the growing traffic asymmetry between ISPs, questioning the established peering or transit agreements. That tendency is due to popular content providers connected to the network through a single ISP, and whose traffic is not charged by distant ISPs. We propose in this paper to review the economic transit agreements between ISPs in order to det...

Interconnection in the Internet: the policy challenge

In days past, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) relied on two basic types of contracts for exchanging traffic (peering and transit) and ISP interconnection was not regulated. As we explained in (Faratin, Clark et al. 2007), the world of Internet interconnection is no longer so simple. The increased complexity poses significant challenges for policymakers who might contemplate regulating Interne...