ntent universally accessible increases the value of the network to both end users and providers of applications and content. Indeed, as the FCC has recognized, the benefits from network neutrality are often SO compelling that the vast majority of network owners can be expected to adhere to it voluntarily (FCC 2005d3). Furthermore, network neutrality hearkens back to the regime of mandatory interconnection and interface standardization used SO successfully by the courts and the FCC to foster competition in customer premises equipment ("CPE"), long distance, and information services, as discussed in Chapter 8. Concepts such as openness and neutrality also seem to promote such widely held values as equality of treatment and freedom of choice. The recent surge of merger activity in the cable and telecommunications industries appears to make concerns about gatekeeper control by network owners all the more plausible. That said, in deciding whether to impose network neutrality as a regulatory mandate, the key question is not whether network neutrality provides substantial benefits. Instead, the key inquiry is whether circumstances exist in which deviations from network neutrality are SO likely to be harmful that firms should be foreclosed from experimenting with them even in the absence of any demonstration of con- sumer harm. As the Supreme Court recognized in Northern Pacific Railway Co. V. United States, which represents the Court's seminal statement on when to treat busi- ness practices as categorically prohibited, a business practice should not be declared illegal per se unless the challenged practice evinces such a "pernicious effect on com- petition" and such a "lack of any redeeming virtue" that nothing would be lost if it were "presumed to be illegal without elaborate inquiry as to the precise harm [it] ha[s] caused or the business excuse for [its] use" (356 U.S. 1, 5 (1957)). The Court reiterated these principles in 2007 in its decision in Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. V. PSKS, Inc., in which the Cour