e were put into place, competition in local telephone service was believed to be impossible. The FCC recognized when eliminating the regulatory requirements imposed by the Computer Inquiries that those rules "were developed before separate and different The Regulation of Local Telephone Networks broadband technologies began to emerge and compete for customers" and could no longer be justified under contemporary circumstances (FCC 2005d, pp. 14,876-7). In short, it is now clear that wireline competition is feasible with respect to large business customers and that wireless telephony has emerged as a vibrant competitor as well. As we discuss in Chapter 4, because platform access necessarily involves comple- mentary products, network owners have powerful incentives to provide it voluntar- ily. The economic consensus is that competition among local telephone providers is sufficient to prevent those providers from engaging in anticompetitive behavior against providers of complementary services. Even if the local telephone market is not competitive, moreover, network owners are still likely to provide platform access voluntarily, because opening networks to the broadest possible array of com- plementary services typically represents the best way for a carrier to maximize the value of its local telephone network. Although economic theorists have identified a set of circumstances under which that would not be true, those exceptions are fairly narrow and require the satisfaction of fairly restrictive conditions. Unfortunately, policymakers have been loath to take wireless competition into account when deciding whether to release local telephone companies from platform access mandates. For example, the legislative history of the 1996 Act indicated that competition from cellular telephone companies should not be considered in determining whether an incumbent local telephone company faced sufficient competition to justify releasing it from the prohibition from offering long distance services (U.S. House 1996). The FCC would 