Volume 4, Issue 1

This paper provides a simple model of bargaining and integration within a network and considers how intra-network structure is impacted on by competition between networks. Apart from its analytical tractability, our model demonstrates how integration can be used strategically to redistribute network profits from downstream firms to upstream providers of network services. It also demonstrates that increased inter-network competition can mitigate incentives for inefficient integration.

Broadband Internet involves two vertical relationships: the Internet Service Provider (ISP) requires both a physical conduit (e.g. telephone or cable television lines) and content. The ISP–conduit relationship has been subject to controversial unbundling regulation, but no such rules apply to the ISP–content relationship. We argue that regardless of whether ISPs are vertically integrated with conduits, they have incentives to create vertical restrictions on content. Foreclosure of ISPs by conduits may not increase and indeed could reduce these restrictions. Thus, telephone common carriage and Internet application neutrality may both be at odds with unbundling and "open access" policies.

We study the incentives for a "diagonal" merger between two Internet Service Providers, one a wireless retail only ISP in two origination markets, and the second a vertically integrated wired retailer in one market and an upstream provider in the other. The merger's effects depend on differentiation in access modalities; only with high differentiation does the merger have positive welfare effects. We focus on post-merger foreclosure, which, when it happens, only takes place in the market where the merger is horizontal and not where the merger is vertical. The Network architecture used is meant to capture Internet routing.

On-line content delivery and vertical alliances between conduit and content providers are nowadays crucial issues in on-line content markets. In this paper, we discuss and compare two types of model for on-line content delivery: push and pull. We assume non-zero marginal cost for network transits, justified by the presence of network services for content delivery (like data caching). Under both models, we show that the rationale behind vertical strategic integration between conduit and content providers in the case of successive monopolies.

The Comisión Reguladora de Energía of Mexico has implemented a netback rule for linking the Mexican natural gas price to the Texas natural gas benchmark price in an industry structure characterized by a vertically integrated state-owned monopoly. This paper shows that in an open economy where agents can choose between gas and alternative fuels, and where the density function describing the distribution of agents along the pipeline can have mass points, the netback rule is Pareto optimal.