haracteristics Connectivity retail layer Vertical integration Discriminatory behaviour Privacy and confidentiality Figure 2.20 Retail layer policy characteristics Content and services layer Vertical integration Privacy and confidentiality Illegal contents Figure 2.21 Content and services layer policy characteristics and therefore can be conducted with a high degree of competition and left to market forces self-regulate. Policy issues of importance to the retail layer are illustrated in Figure 2.20. Compared with the infrastructure layer, content and retail layers require significantly less initial investment. As a result many internet service providers compete using the underlying infrastructure in many countries. Similarly many content providers and over the top (OTT) service providers, such as Skype or WhatsApp, compete using the retailer and infrastructure layers. Government role in regulating competition in these two layers can be minimal as market forces have led to efficient business systems. Policy issues of importance to the content and services layer are illustrated in Figure 2.21. Nevertheless, similar to retail layer, the content and services layer may give rise to issues on vertical integration privacy and confidentiality in relation to subscriber information. A verti- cally integrated player may discriminate delivery of a content of a competitor by slowing it down and reducing its QoS. This behaviour has led to calls for net neutrality, meaning that an infrastructure owner/operator and to a degree a retailer must treat all bits equally. That is, traffic from all content/service providers must be delivered with the same level of QoS. Furthermore, governments may be concerned with the kind of content that may be provided, both in terms of intellectual property rights (piracy) as well as unsuitable content such as por- nography, and SO on. Vertical integration across three broadband telecommunications ecosystem layers, as illus- trated in Figure 2.22, may lead to discriminatory behaviour. In recent year