How Neutral is a CDN? An economic approach

Abstract

The growing importance of Content Delivery Network (CDN) in the value chain of content delivery raises concerns about the “neutrality” of these players. We propose in this paper a model to analyze the impact of revenue-oriented CDN management policies on the fairness of the competition among two content providers that use CDN services to deliver contents. We show that there exists a unique optimal revenue-maximizing policy for a CDN actor-the dimensioning and allocation of its storage capacity-that depends on prices for service/transport/storage, and on the distribution of content popularity. Using data from the analysis of traces from two major content providers (YouTube Live and justin.tv), we remark that a CDN remains a relatively neutral actor even when one of the content providers it serves tries to monopolize the CDN storage space by implementing an aggressive policy to harm its competitors.