  Representatives of several Internet service providers (ISPs) have expressed
their wish to see a substantial change in the pricing policies of the Internet.
In particular, they would like to see content providers (CPs) pay for use of
the network, given the large amount of resources they use. This would be in
clear violation of the "network neutrality" principle that had characterized
the development of the wireline Internet. Our first goal in this paper is to
propose and study possible ways of implementing such payments and of regulating
their amount. We introduce a model that includes the users' behavior, the
utilities of the ISP and of the CPs, and the monetary flow that involves the
content users, the ISP and CP, and in particular, the CP's revenues from
advertisements. We consider various game models and study the resulting
equilibria; they are all combinations of a noncooperative game (in which the
ISPs and CPs determine how much they will charge the users) with a
"cooperative" one on how the CP and the ISP share the payments. We include in
our model a possible asymmetric weighting parameter (that varies between zero
to one). We also study equilibria that arise when one of the CPs colludes with
the ISP. We also study two dynamic game models and study the convergence of
prices to the equilibrium values.
