BUSINESS MODEL COMPETITION IN THE CONTENT DELIVERY MARKET - AN INFRASTRUCTURE ANALYSIS

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we characterize the participants of today\u27s commercial CDN market according to their business model and their set of resources. Second, we use real-world Internet topology data in order to infer CDN infrastructure resources that are associated with market success. Third, we use resource-dependency theory in order to assess if a cooperation of market participants with different business models can change the CDN market concentration based on its resources. Our results indicate that the most successful CDNs use a large number of direct interconnections with networks that are situated close to the content consuming end-customer in order to improve termination quality. Moreover, we can show that White Label CDNs are successful in acquiring the resources that are associated with market success. Finally, our results point out that a large ISP coalition which includes today?s Inhouse CDNs could reproduce the most important infrastructure properties of the current market leaders

Vertical Platform Interaction on the Internet: How ISPS and CDNS Interact

Contend delivery networks (CDN) are important players on the Internet. They provide services towebsites that improve the quality of service (QoS) and provide end users (EU) with a betterexperience, i.e. faster loading web pages. CDNs can be seen as platforms that cater for two distinctgroups of customers. On the one side, they have content providers (CP), i.e. web sites; on the otherside they need to collaborate with Internet service providers (ISP) to reach EUs. We construct aformal model that demonstrates the pricing decisions of ISPs and CDNs and contrast it to thestandard types of pricing Internet access and traffic. As a modelling tool we use theory on two-sidedmarkets and bottleneck platforms. We find that ISPs have relatively high market power and extractprofits from CDNs to compete for EUs

Wettbewerb und Kooperation im Content Delivery Markt

Durch neue bandbreitenintensive Dienste wird das Verkehrsvolumen im Internet in den nächsten Jahren stark wachsen. Von dieser Entwicklung profitieren vor allem Unternehmen, die sich auf die Verteilung von Daten und Diensten spezialisiert haben. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit identifi-zieren und klassifizieren wir die kommerziellen Anbieter in diesem Markt nach ihren Geschäfts-modellen und untersuchen mit einer Längsschnittanalyse, die für den Geschäftserfolg wichtige Erreichbarkeit der Konsumenten. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass der Einsatz von Peer-to-Peer-Technologie mit einer Einsparung von kostenintensiven Transitverbindungen einhergeht. Des Weiteren lässt sich im Markt ein allgemeiner Trend zu Kooperation beobachten