The price of tussles: bankrupt in cyberspace ?

The question of who funds the Internet network infrastructure is a timely and hot debate. The spectrum of answers is wide. The classical direction is the mutualization of Internet access providers efforts (e.g. [1]). Curiously, the debate recently involved a tussle between two values: the content against its carriers (i.e. any operator that provides the data transport service - then being an an Internet Service Provider, ISP - or any other services either in the access or the transit part). On the one hand, carriers, alarmed by the data traffic explosion [2], and seeing their sources of revenues diminish, want content and application providers to share the costs of the network infrastructure in order to sustain bandwidth demand evolution. On the other hand, content providers can rightly argue that, users buying the Internet access to access content, they should have in return a part of the Internet access revenues. These tussles had sometimes consequences on end-users who experimented service degradations, the time that commercial agreements were reached. The concept of tussles is not new. Clark et al. [3] foresee them as those that will draw tomorrow's Internet. But will there be a tomorrow for the Internet without a network infrastructure? 2016 is seen by many as a breaking point in the Internet economy. Under the assumption that current trends in prices and demand will hold, revenues will not be able anymore to support the required investments in network infrastructure1 . But who foretells the future lies even if he tells the truth.