ecidedly reluctant to embrace such an indeterminate approach. The open-endedness of the approach and the lack of a clear notion of optimality leave it vulnerable to being redirected towards political purposes. In this regard, the fate of the "populist" school of antitrust provides a useful object lesson.³7 This school embraced a noneconomic vision of competition policy that protected small players in order to promote democratic values associated with Brandeisian pluralism even when doing SO was economically costly. 38 Over time, courts and commentators began to recognize that because many industries are subject to economies of scale, preserving small producers has a price. The problem was that populism failed to provide a basis for determining when the costs outweighed the benefits. By the end of the 1980s, even those sympathetic to the populist school were forced to concede that the economic approach to antitrust had prevailed. In the process, antitrust shifted from hostility toward vertical integration in order to protect small players for largely noneconomic reasons to a more nuanced, explicitly economic approach that recognized that vertical integration can yield substantial economic benefits (Yoo 2002). Broadband policy could be well served to follow the same path and recognize the dangers of an excessive focus on preserving the freedom of consumers and content/applications providers and that permitting a degree of vertical integration can represent a better way to promote economic welfare. Arguments justifying the regulation of telecommunications networks because they are "affected with the public interest" are similarly unlikely to prove a satis- factory basis for regulation. As noted in Chapter 9, modern courts now regard this category as analytically empty. In addition, the category was notoriously slippery. For overviews of the conflict between the Chicago and the Populist Schools that manifest distinctly different sympathies, see Jacobs (1995); Meese (2000); Areeda and Hovenkamp (2006a). For a classic 