Preferential Revealing of Content Popularity Among Competing Service Providers Induces Network Bias

In this paper, we address the issue of network neutrality, i.e. whether a content provider (CP) should prioritize one internet service provider (ISP) over another. In particular, we examine how a CP’s management of preferential treatment can influence competing ISPs by studying a scenario in which two ISPs compete for access to the content of a single CP. The CP subscribes to the ISP that offers a sufficient quality of service (QoS) to meet his traffic needs at an appropriate price. Since the CP holds private content popularity information, we consider two scenarios: in the first, the CP is required to publicly disclose content popularity information, without any private information, and in the second, the CP provides private signaling information directly to his preferred ISP and the competing ISPs additionally know the probability distribution of the content’s popularity. We model the two scenarios as a Bayesian game and show which scenario is more advantageous for the preferred ISP. Paradoxically, the scenario that imposes neutrality is sometimes more favorable to the preferred ISP, compared with the non-neutrality cases.