Handbook of Media Economics, vol 1A

payments. In particular, content providers have an incentive to reduce the volume of

time-sensitive traffic that they send.

Summarizing the state of the net neutrality debate is beyond the scope of this article

(for a recent survey on the academic analysis of net neutrality, see

Kra

¨

mer et al., 2013).

The important lesson emerging from the debate is that regulatory decisions affect the rent

distribution between content providers and ISPs. This, in turn, may affect the strategy of

media platforms. In particular, if congestion is not priced, content providers may add a lot

of traffic stemming from advertising (e.g., advertising preceding videos). If congestion is

priced, media platforms may obtain a larger fraction of revenues from charging con-

sumers ...