Peer Unreviewed

Over the weekend there was considerable chatter on the Internet about Netflix and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. According to news reports like this , Netflix is exploring P2P technology as a delivery mechanism, to defray cost of delivery to consumers. This becomes even relevant with the new net neutrality proposals that will allow " fast lanes " to exist on the Internet, paving the way for ISPs to charge more from customers like Netflix which will then ultimately get passed on to Netflix's consumers. However, if Netflix does intend to use P2P to work around this incoming increase in costs, why should consumers help out Netflix? We tackled this precise issue a few years ago and provided some answers. We looked at scenarios of a coalition that has one large "atomic" player (e.g. Netflix) and infinitesimally small peers (relative to the atomic player). The idea is applicable for many different scenarios, for example Femtocells , the FON network, P2P peer-as...

Our group has been researching and thinking about Internet Economics for quite sometime now. Events are backing up our predictions, and they are not good for consumers. Over 5 years ago,  we published the following work,  driven by at that time a PhD student of ours, Richard Ma :  Richard T.B. Ma, Dahming Chiu, John C.S. Lui, Vishal Misra and Dan Rubenstein ,   On Cooperative Settlement Between Content, Transit and Eyeball Internet Service Providers, Proceedings of 2008 ACM Conference on Emerging network experiment and technology (CoNEXT 2008), Madrid, Spain, December, 2008 I am happy to answer any questions regarding the math/analysis in the paper, and the slides associated with the talk we gave are here , but in the next few lines I will try and explain the implications  of the analysis. We looked at the economic ecosystem of the Internet, using Shapley values, with cooperative game theory as the guiding principle. Our analysis revealed something in...

The recent announcement of the Comcast acquisition of Time Warner Cable  has caused quite a furore. Consumer advocates are worried that it will cause problems, higher prices, bad performance etc. The issue is it will lead to the creation of a giant monopoly. Comcast argues that it is not a monopoly and as it is Time Warner and Comcast do not compete in any market so it should make no difference anyway. There are two issues here: (a) first is the question why have Time Warner and Comcast, two giant corporations not  competed anywhere yet? and, (b) the second and more important issue is not that of competition for cable service, which ostensibly Dish Networks also provides, but for Broadband access, where 19 of the top 20 metropolitan areas in the US will have only one  choice for wired Broadband. The merger/acquisition is not between two Cable  companies, but that of wired Broadband ISPs that are virtual monopolies. Our work,  Richard T. B. Ma and Vish...