The impact and implications of the growth in residential user-to-user traffic
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Net neutrality: the technical side of the debate: a white paper
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
An empirical approach to modeling inter-AS traffic matrices
IMC '05 Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement
The internet is not a big truck: toward quantifying network neutrality
PAM'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Passive and active network measurement
The flattening internet topology: natural evolution, unsightly barnacles or contrived collapse?
PAM'08 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Passive and active network measurement
A User-Influenced Pricing Mechanism for Internet Access
ICQT '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Internet Charging and Qos Technologies: Network Economics for Next Generation Networks
On economic heavy hitters: shapley value analysis of 95th-percentile pricing
IMC '10 Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
The public option: a non-regulatory alternative to network neutrality
Proceedings of the Seventh COnference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
The public option: a nonregulatory alternative to network neutrality
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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At the core of the network neutrality debate we find that ISPs, in particular the last-mile Access Providers (APs), are trying to find new ways to be profitable, despite the fact that their transit traffic has been dramatically increasing, while they continue to charge their customers a flat monthly price. In this paper, we consider a simple model of an AP that serves its users traffic from a number of Content Providers (CPs). The AP can communicate with the CPs through a Transit Provider (TP) or through settlement-free peering. We examine the profitability of the AP under a "baseline" model that is based on current practice, considering the heavy tailed variability in per-user traffic and in the popularity of different CPs. Further, we consider other strategies, such as usage-based pricing for heavy hitters, selective peering with popular CPs, and content caching. Our results indicate that an AP can be profitable without the risk of losing users and without violating "network neutrality", through selective peering with CPs and/or content caching.