Internet service providers (ISPs) depend on one another to provide global network services. In the current Internet, autonomous ISPs implement bilateral settlements, with each ISP establishing contracts that suit its own local objective to maximize its profit. However, the profit-seeking nature of the ISPs leads to selfish behaviors that result in inefficiencies and disputes in the network. This book studies the use of the Shapley value as a profit mechanism for ISPs to reach settlements. Theoretically, we show that if the Shapley profit-distribution is enforced at a global level, then ISPs...

This book presents Internet transport economics as a new approach to understanding the packet-switching paradigm of Internet infrastructure as a global transport system for data packets. It is a prescient view of the Internet’s evolution into a content-centric service platform where the quality of services (QoS) cannot be guaranteed due to the tens of thousands of autonomous systems that enact business decisions on peering, routing, and pricing in a way that determines aspects of the Internet ecosystem like network topology, latency and throughput of traffic flows, and performance of...