Internet access and investment incentives for broadband service providers

This paper studies a model of the Internet broadband market as a platform in order to show how different pricing schemes from the so-called net neutrality may increased economic efficiency by allowing more investment of access providers and enhancing consumers surplus and social welfare. --Network neutrality,Flat rates,Termination fees

From the “broadband ditch” to the release of the 2010 US national broadband plan. A short history of the broadband penetration debate in the US

The paper provides an historical account of the policy debate that took place in the United States after the 2007 release of the OECD's broadband statistics. It explains why and in what context such a debate occurred (lack of relevant statistics from the FCC, dissatisfaction of some stakeholders with the deregulation of broadband, role of new players). The paper reviews the policy options proposed by the main players to foster the deployment of broadband, among others the potential inclusion of broadband in the scope of the US universal service, the need for a national policy, and implementation/funding issues. It puts into perspective the national broadband plan proposed by the FCC in March 2010.broadband, competition, industrial policies, government intervention, universal service, open internet, deregulation, rankings/ benchmarking countries.

Beyond Personalization: Research Directions in Multistakeholder Recommendation

Recommender systems are personalized information access applications; they are ubiquitous in today's online environment, and effective at finding items that meet user needs and tastes. As the reach of recommender systems has extended, it has become apparent that the single-minded focus on the user common to academic research has obscured other important aspects of recommendation outcomes. Properties such as fairness, balance, profitability, and reciprocity are not captured by typical metrics for recommender system evaluation. The concept of multistakeholder recommendation has emerged as a unifying framework for describing and understanding recommendation settings where the end user is not the sole focus. This article describes the origins of multistakeholder recommendation, and the landscape of system designs. It provides illustrative examples of current research, as well as outlining open questions and research directions for the field.Comment: 64 page

Beyond Transparency: The Semantics of Rulemaking for an Open Internet

In trying to promote the development of an open Internet, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has primarily tried to encourage network providers to be transparent about their traffic management practices and quality of service prioritization policies. Dominant network operators have successfully challenged this minimalist approach to addressing end-user concerns about the rise of a two-tiered Internet, motivating the FCC to engage in yet another public consultation process to assess its future approach to the problem. This article maps the debate using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools that allow us to build a systematic picture of the positions of the regulator and groups of private interests trying to shape its decisions. A quantitative linguistic analysis of the content of formal written submissions to the FCC by parties with divergent views helps document how the conceptual model of the regulator evolved during the rulemaking process leading to the FCC February 2015 network neutrality Order. Despite the adoption of a broader substantive basis by the FCC under Title II of the Communications Act, the rule-of-reason approach to substantive interpretation in the Order limits the capacity of the new regulatory framework to protect and promote an open Internet. The evidence suggests the public consultation process is likely to serve as a tool for legitimizing status quo institutional arrangements that allow operators to engage in discriminatory traffic prioritization strategies

Economics Of Non-Neutrality In The Internet

Net-neutrality on the Internet is the set of policies that prevents a paid or unpaid discrimination by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) among different types of transmitted data. The recent moves to change the net neutrality rules and the growing demand for data have driven the ISPs to provide differential treatment of traffic to generate additional revenue streams from Content Providers (CPs). In this thesis, we consider economic frameworks to investigate different questions about the departure toward a non-neutral regime and its possible consequences. In particular, we i) assess whether different entities of the market have the incentive to adopt a non-neutral pricing scheme; and if yes ii) what are the pricing strategies they choose; and iii) how these changes affect the Internet market. First, we investigate the incentives of different entities of the Internet market for migrating to a non-neutral regime. Thus, we consider early stages of a non-neutral Internet. We consider a diverse set of parameters for the market, e.g. market powers of ISPs, sensitivity of EUs and CPs to the quality of the content. The goal is to obtain founded insights on whether there exists a market equilibrium, the structure of the equilibria, and how they depend on different parameters of the market when the current equilibrium (neutral regime) is disrupted and some ISPs have switched to a non-neutral regime. Then, we seek to investigate frameworks using which ISPs and CPs select appropriate incentives for each other, and investigate the implications of these new schemes on the entities of the Internet market. We analyze two non-neutral frameworks. In the first framework, we focus on the price competition between ISPs in the presence of uncertainty in competition and demand when CPs, i.e. demand, is merely price taker, i.e. passive in equilibrium selection. Then, in the second framework, we consider the case in which CPs have an active role in the market, and decide on the number of resources they want to reserve/buy from ISPs based on the price ISPs quote. In this case, we also consider the coupling between limited resources and the quality of the content delivered to end-users and subsequently the strategies of the decision makers. We obtain strategies for ISPs and CPs under a variety of market dynamics

Net Neutrality and Nonprofit Fundraising: Will It Affect Us, and If So How Much?

In 2015, the FCC issued its most sweeping order protecting net neutrality. Fast forward to today’s environment in which the FCC rolled back most net neutrality protections for consumers and producers of content on the Internet. The essence of such deregulation is that Internet service providers can discriminate among Internet users, allowing prioritization (for a price) in the transmission of their data. In this paper, we address different “discrimination” policies (regulatory regimes) to determine how they could affect nonprofits. We expect this research to inform nonprofits, policymakers, and consumers about technology and media policy for nonprofit organizations in the future

Occupy Wall Street, Distributive Justice, and Tax Scholarship: An Ideology Critique of the Consumption Tax Debate

[Excerpt] “This Article argues that the pro-consumption tax literature is wrong to claim that no legitimate fairness objections to the consumption tax exist. It argues that the persistent and widespread wariness about replacing our current hybrid consumption tax/income tax system with a pure consumption tax is, contrary to what the pro-consumption tax literature asserts, completely justified. In fact, our reservations about the consumption tax’s fairness reflect legitimate concern about the role of capitalist power in America, particularly over the past thirty years. Indeed, the more the nation continues to experience the social welfare effects of increased capitalist power, the more compelling these objections become. History proves these concerns not just legitimate, but paramount. A full account, not a dismissal, of how capitalist power might benefit from a consumption tax is what would be required to meet these fairness objections. Part II of this Article fleshes out the fairness objections more fully and addresses the counter arguments that exist in the literature. In doing so, it seeks to reestablish the legitimacy of fairness objections to a consumption tax and encourage more robust and historically aware considerations of distributive justice in tax policy. Part II goes further and shows that the consumption tax literature gets it wrong in a particularly revealing way. Part II characterizes the pro-consumption tax literature’s dismissal of serious fairness and distributive justice concerns as, essentially, ideological; the literature’s very framing of the fairness issue precludes any serious consideration of the historical reality of capitalist power. Ideology, not argument, supports the claim that capitalist power is not a concern.

Strengthening Agricultural Innovation Capacity: Are Innovation Brokers the Answer?

This paper examines the role of innovation brokers in stimulating innovation system interaction and innovation capacity building, and illustrates this by taking the case of Dutch agriculture as an example. Subsequently, it reflects upon the potential role of innovation brokers in developing countries' agriculture. It concludes that innovation brokerage roles are likely to become relevant in emerging economies and that public or donor investment in innovation brokerage may be needed to overcome inherent tensions regarding the neutrality and funding of such players in the innovation system. The Dutch experience suggests that innovation brokers need to be contextually embedded, and are unlikely to become effective through a centrally-imposed design. Hence, we conclude that stimulating their emergence requires a policy that supports institutional learning and experimentation. In the evaluation of such experiments, it is important to note that innovation brokers tend to play intangible roles that are not easily captured through conventional indicators.Agriculture, Developing Countries, The Netherlands, Innovation Broker, Neutrality, Institutional Learning, Context-Specific, Innovation Systems, Capacity Strengthening, Agricultural Extension