Introduction

While the previous chapter discussed competition between network service providers, which could be access network providers, or transit providers needing (or required) to cooperate to deliver traffic to its destination, the present chapter focuses on the competition at the content and application service provider level. We are going to see that the models can be formulated in a very general way, hence being closely related to what we described in the previous chapter for access network providers. Indeed, the main driver for customer choices is the price, but some notions of quality (of service) and reputation, among others, can or need to be dealt with too, leading to similar models for customers' choice of service provider (following the Wardrop principle, or some discrete-choice or stickiness models). Those choices will be briefly recalled in the next section. We thus have multi-level Stackelberg games with providers playing first on price and sometimes at an even higher-level content/service investment, anticipating the reaction of users to any strategy profile in terms of consumption.

The categories of content and application service providers which we have in mind are mainly (but are not limited to) (i) content providers, such as news web sites, for example, competing on the relevance and quality of content, design of the site, awareness, and attractiveness through advertising; (ii) online shops with similar characteristics; (iii) content delivery networks (CDNs), which have to attract content providers in terms of price too, but also in terms of the QoS for users through investments in strategically located capacities; (iv) similarly cloud service providers (even though we highlighted in Chapter 4 that for users a comparison of cloud services is complex due to the different service formulations, which are probably intended to allow providers to avoid fierce competition); (v) service applications such as search engines competing for keyword searches through relevance of the results, leading tomore revenues from sponsored links (we will describe security providers as an illustration); (vi) application stores, albeit to a lesser extent, because for some operating systems the choice of store is limited; and (vii) architects/device builders.