We study the pros and cons of the “fair cost sharing” proposal, which entitles the charging of a fraction of the traffic cost incurred by an access Internet Service Provider (ISP) to the Content Providers (CPs) that deliver content to the access ISP users. This study is conducted in a scenario where CPs host their content in a platform and where the platform operates two-sided pricing for the intermediation between CPs and users. Our hypotheses is that this two-sided pricing interacts in a relevant manner with the access ISP, which can only price the user side. We conclude that a cost sharing regulation, when complete pass-through is executed by a content aggregating platform, does not improve the ISP’s profit and does not preclude the platform from obtaining profits either. Furthermore, we found that the value that the platform eventually captures is the value that the ISP would capture if the platform was absent.

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Fair Cost Sharing Under Platform Two-Sided Intermediation

  • Luis Guijarro,
  • José Ramón Vidal,
  • Vicent Pla

摘要

We study the pros and cons of the “fair cost sharing” proposal, which entitles the charging of a fraction of the traffic cost incurred by an access Internet Service Provider (ISP) to the Content Providers (CPs) that deliver content to the access ISP users. This study is conducted in a scenario where CPs host their content in a platform and where the platform operates two-sided pricing for the intermediation between CPs and users. Our hypotheses is that this two-sided pricing interacts in a relevant manner with the access ISP, which can only price the user side. We conclude that a cost sharing regulation, when complete pass-through is executed by a content aggregating platform, does not improve the ISP’s profit and does not preclude the platform from obtaining profits either. Furthermore, we found that the value that the platform eventually captures is the value that the ISP would capture if the platform was absent.