Market driven network neutrality and the fallacies of Internet traffic quality regulation

Abstract

In the U.S. paying for priority arrangements between Internet access service providers and Internet application providers to favor some traffic over other traf-fic is considered unreasonable discrimination. In Europe the focus is on mini-mum traffic quality requirements. It can be shown that neither market power nor universal service arguments can justify traffic quality regulation. In particular, heterogeneous demand for traffic quality for delay sensitive versus delay insen-sitive applications requires traffic quality differentiation, priority pricing and evolutionary development of minimal traffic qualities. --