Disentangling economic and political goals in the net neutrality debate

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User preference for fixed vs. mobile internet regarding quality of service: Its implications on mobile network neutrality

The rapid development of information and communication technology has facilitated Internet use considerably, particularly with regard to the speed of packet transfer at access segments. With the boom in bit-intensive and live-streaming content in the broadband Internet ecosystem, the phenomenon of increasing and persisting congestion on the Internet is no longer a mere engineering possibility but a grave and imminent reality. To deal with this problem, network neutrality has become the focus of discussion among operators, academics, and telecom regulators in recent years. Over the past several months, one of the most contentious issues in the US discussion of network neutrality has been whether both mobile and fixed Internet access should comply with similar network neutrality standards. Unfortunately, thus far, policy has been developed and academic debates have taken place without an understanding of the extent to which fixed and mobile Internet services are, from the user's perspective, close substitutes. Therefore, it is impossible to determine whether it is beneficial to treat these services similarly. Using a Web-based questionnaire, this paper shows empirically that users' communication quality preferences for fixed broadband differ significantly from their preferences for its mobile counterpart, suggesting that different treatments should be proposed for each broadband medium in order to attain optimal resource allocation. --

Tradeable Spectrum Interference Rights

Spectrum rights have gained increasing attention since Ronald Coase pointed out that the most efficient way to assign spectrum is to give it to those users who value it most through property-like rights and secondary markets. Defining spectrum rights turns out to be difficult due to the nature of electronic emissions[1]. As a result, it may be more practical to define interference rights (similar to pollution rights) rather than exclusive usage rights. Interference rights give a user the right to interfere with another user up to a specified level. In this paper, we develop the idea of a market in spectrum interference rights and, using some plausible use cases, illustrate its characteristics. The paper therefore includes a detailed description of interference rights along with some first order quantitative modelling of the use cases coupled with qualitative analysis

The Beginnings and Prospective Ending of “End-to-End”: An Evolutionary Perspective On the Internet’s Architecture

The technology of “the Internet” is not static. Although its “end-to- end” architecture has made this “connection-less” communications system readily “extensible,” and highly encouraging to innovation both in hardware and software applications, there are strong pressures for engineering changes. Some of these are wanted to support novel transport services (e.g. voice telephony, real-time video); others would address drawbacks that appeared with opening of the Internet to public and commercial traffic - e.g., the difficulties of blocking delivery of offensive content, suppressing malicious actions (e.g. “denial of service” attacks), pricing bandwidth usage to reduce congestion. The expected gains from making “improvements” in the core of the network should be weighed against the loss of the social and economic benefits that derive from the “end-to-end” architectural design. Even where technological “fixes” can be placed at the networks’ edges, the option remains to search for alternative, institutional mechanisms of governing conduct in cyberspace.

Credibility-Based Binary Feedback Model for Grid Resource Planning

In commercial grids, Grid Service Providers (GSPs) can improve their profitability by maintaining the lowest possible amount of resources to meet client demand. Their goal is to maximize profits by optimizing resource planning. In order to achieve this goal, they require an estimate of the demand for their service, but collecting demand data is costly and difficult. In this paper we develop an approach to building a proxy for demand, which we call a value profile. To construct a value profile, we use binary feedback from a collection of heterogeneous clients. We show that this can be used as a proxy for a demand function that represents a client’s willingness-to-pay for grid resources. As with all binary feedback systems, clients may require incentives to provide feedback and deterrents to selfish behavior, such as misrepresenting their true preferences to obtain superior services at lower costs. We use credibility mechanisms to detect untruthful feedback and penalize insincere or biased clients. Finally, we use game theory to study how cooperation can emerge in this community of clients and GSPs