On the Economics of Internet Peering

We discuss economic rationales behind peering decisions in the Internet. In We discuss economic rationales behind peering decisions in the Internet. In the first part of the paper we analyze the decision about a bilateral peering agreement between two commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) who are in Cournot competition. In the second part we discuss multilateral peer-ing between commercial ISPs and an academic research network (ARN). The latter is organized as club of academics who share the cost of their net-work. It is discussed whether peering threatens the existence of the ARN and under what circumstances a commercial ISP would want to use strate-gic pricing to win all ARN-members as customers.