The Net Neutrality issue has been at the center of debate worldwide lately. Some countries have established laws so that principles of Net Neutrality are
respected, the Netherlands being the latest country in Europe...Among the
questions that have been discussed in these debates are whether to allow
agreements between service and content providers, i.e. to allow some
preferential treatment by an operator to traffic from some subset of providers. Our goal in this paper is to analyze the impact of non neutral pricing and
agreements on the Internet users and on the content providers. Each one of
several Internet users have to decide in which way to split their demand among
several content providers. The cost for an Internet user depends on whether the
content providers have an agreement with the Internet Service Provider in which
the Internet user is connected to. In addition, the requests coming from users
depend on the preference of the consumer in the different CP. We model the
choice of how to split the demands and the pricing aspects faced by the content
providers as a hierarchical game model composed of a congestion game at the
lower level and a noncooperative pricing game at the upper level. We show that
agreement between providers have a positive impact on the equilibrium
performance of the Internet users. We further show that at equilibrium, the
content provider on the contrary, does not benefit from the agreement.(read more)