e Computer Inquiries also required the major local telephone companies to offer tariffs providing nondiscriminatory access to the network to any firm presenting its data configured in accordance with that standardized interface (FCC 1986a, p. 1039). As we discuss in greater detail in Chapters 11 and 12, many industry players and public interest groups are advocat- ing imposing platform access to broadband networks through the cluster of policy proposals that fall under the banner of "network neutrality." By increasing the availability of complementary goods, platform access typically causes network demand to increase, which in turn affects the network's optimal configuration, capacity, and reliability. As we discuss in Chapter 5, the normal way for network owners to protect network performance should network demand exceed expectations is to deny service to new customers. As is the case with respect to other forms of access, mandating platform access forecloses this option and forces the network either to permit network performance to degrade or to maintain excess capacity as insurance against this possibility. Both solutions necessarily either raise costs or reduce consumer benefits. The inability to deny service to any complementary service provider becomes particularly troublesome once one acknowledges how sensitive network perfor- mance is to the magnitude and variability of demand. The introduction of par- ticular traffic affects the network in nonuniform ways. Not only can it cause local congestion in the areas near where the traffic enters the network; as our discussion of the max-flow/min-cut theorem in Chapter 2 demonstrates, networks' ability to route traffic along other paths can also cause the introduction of traffic in one location to impair performance in portions of the network that are located far from where the additional traffic is introduced. The impact on network performance thus depends not only on the magnitude and variability of the flows being intro- duced into the network through platform 