Impact of Heterogeneous Neutrality Rules with Competitive Content Providers

Network neutrality has recently been repealed in the United States, leading to a worldwide Internet with different imposed policies. We build and analyze in this paper a game-theoretic model representing the interactions between users, network providers and content providers in this heterogeneous regulation context, and investigate the impact of two neutrality relaxation policies in a part of the world on all actors, compared with a fully-neutral network. Our results show that neutrality repeal may only favor the ISP in the differentiation-authorized zone, but no other actor, and that it can be worse off for everybody if the regulation procedures are very strict in the neutral area.