Sharing Multicast Costs
Multicasting is considered to be a special case - in this instance, a single data flow is shared by multiple users, and the author is interested in determining how the costs are shared among multiple parties.
EN: I don't think he "gets" it - while multiple clients can all tap into the same source, each receives a unique stream of data. It is therefore not a single transmission received by several, like a broadcast signal, but a number of separate connections between the source and each recipients. He diagrams a "multicast" as data that originates with source A that is downloads by source B, and source C gets the data from source B. I still don't see the difference, in that there are two distinct network connections: between A and B, then between B and C. If he's talking about syndication, there are already many economic models for that - and it's quite simple: A is a vendor to B, and B is a vendor to C. However, he seems to be focused on the cost of the data transmission (not a charge for accessing content). And so, I don't see how this examination is relevant to anything "real" on the internet, and even the theoretical aspects are redundant to existing economic theory.