A Two-Sided Market Analysis of Provider Investment Incentives With an Application to the Net-Neutrality Issue
John Musacchio, UC Santa Cruz
Galina Schwartz & Jean Walrand, UC Berkeley

You can find a PDF copy of the paper in its entirety here.

In the current make up of the content provider/ISP/end-user trio, there are still questions pertaining to how and who payment should be coming from for the delivery of Internet content and services.  Much of the fear and cause for the desire of Net Neutrality regulation has been the concern that ISP’s would charge all content providers that crossed their wires surcharges along with the end-user subscribed to that ISP.

As it works currently, ISP’s charge the end-user subscriber and the content providers directly connected to the ISP.  Content providers delivering services and content that are not directly connected to the ISP do not pay fees to that ISP.

In the featured paper, Musacchio, Schwartz, and Walrand develop a two-sided model that incorporates the ISP’s, end-users, and content providers analyzing both a two-sided non-neutral market and a one-sided neutral market.  They suggest that “the imposition of regulation that precludes the ISPs from two-sided pricing corresponds to a neutral network, while the practice of two-sided pricing corresponds to a non-neutral network.”

You can find a PDF copy of the paper in its entirety here.