This paper analyzes two business practices on the mobile internet market, paid prioritization and zero-rating. These practices allow the internet service provider to discriminate different content types. With prioritization, the ISP delivers content at different speeds; with zero-rating, the ISP charges different prices. In recent years these practices have attracted considerable media attention and regulatory interest. When the asymmetry between content providers is limited, in particular with regard to their ability to attract traffic or to monetize it, we first show that the ISP can extract more surplus from consumers by privileging the relatively weaker content and restoring symmetry between content providers. Next, we show that the ISP chooses prioritization when traffic is highly valuable for content providers and congestion is severe, and zero-rating in all other cases. Finally, we find that a policy banning prioritization can lead to zero-rating and a reduction in consumer surplus.

本文分析了移动互联网市场上的两种业务实践，即付费优先级和零利率。这些做法允许Internet服务提供商区分不同的内容类型。通过优先级划分，ISP以不同的速度交付内容。零费率时，ISP会收取不同的价格。近年来，这些做法引起了媒体的广泛关注和监管关注。当内容提供商之间的不对称性受到限制时，特别是在吸引流量或将其货币化方面，我们首先表明ISP可以通过让相对较弱的内容享有特权并恢复内容提供商之间的对称性来从消费者那里获得更多的剩余。接下来，我们表明，当流量对于内容提供商而言非常宝贵且拥塞严重时，ISP选择优先级，在其他所有情况下均为零。最后，我们发现禁止优先排序的政策可能导致零税率和减少消费者剩余。