Impact of content caching on competitive dynamics of internet content delivery ecosystem

The current Internet architecture was never designed to deal with the type of traffic it is carrying today. This has led to the rise of add-on solutions such as web and caching and CDNs as well as new revolutionary networking paradigms such as Information-Centric Networking (ICN). The common theme in all these solutions is the extensive reliance on content caching. Content caching has already been studied extensively from the technology perspective; however, few have analysed the influence of caching on the market dynamics between the main stakeholders of the internet content delivery ecosystem. In this work an analysis of these influences is conducted using a bottom-up approach. The analysis which is based on information collected during expert interviewing, first determines the main parameters affecting caching, then identifies the major shifts in control points, through which ICN caching influence the Internet content delivery ecosystem and finally the analysis is mapped to real stakeholder market movements. The results of the analysis highlight the importance of both access and content providers who retain two critical control points irrespective of the caching architecture in use. They also shed light on two shortcomings that ICN architectures suffer from. The first is the content provider contractual complexity and the second is the domination of most ICN caching control points by the Internet Service Providers