Increasing content consumption by users and the expectation of a better Internet experience requires Internet service providers (ISPs) to expand the capacity of the access network continually. The ISPs have been demanding the participation of the content providers (CPs) in sharing the cost of upgrading the infrastructure. From CPs' perspective, investing in the ISP infrastructure, termed as \emph{public investment}, seems rational as it will boost their profit. However, the CPs can alternatively invest in making content delivery more efficient, termed as \emph{private investment}, as it also boosts their profit. Thus, in this work, we investigate this trade-off between public and private investment of the CPs for a net-neutral ISP. Specifically, we consider centralized decision and non-cooperative forms of interaction between CPs and an ISP and determine the optimum public and private investments of the CPs for each model. In the non-cooperative interaction, we find that at most one CP contributes to the public infrastructure, whereas all invest in their private infrastructure.

翻译：用户内容消费的持续增长以及对更优互联网体验的预期，要求互联网服务提供商（ISP）不断扩展接入网络的容量。ISP一直要求内容提供商（CP）参与分担基础设施升级的成本。从CP的角度来看，投资于ISP基础设施（称为公共投资）似乎是合理的，因为这将提升其利润。然而，CP也可以选择投资于提高内容交付效率（称为私人投资），因为这同样能增加其利润。因此，在本研究中，我们探讨了CP在公共投资与私人投资之间的权衡问题，研究对象为一个保持网络中立性的ISP。具体而言，我们考虑了CP与ISP之间的集中决策和非合作互动形式，并确定了每种模型下CP的最优公共投资与私人投资。在非合作互动中，我们发现至多有一个CP会为公共基础设施做出贡献，而所有CP都会投资于其私人基础设施。