 share to allow it to harm competition. Consequently, the FCC conditioned its approval of the merger on the divestiture of MCI's backbone assets. Once those assets had been spun off, the agency saw no reason to mandate interconnection access. The spinoff of MCI's backbone business ensured that the backbone market would remain sufficiently competitive to obviate the need for any direct regulation of interconnection (FCC 1998c). Competition among backbone providers has thus been sufficient to obviate any need to mandate interconnection access among last-mile broadband providers. Any move toward concentration in the backbone market is better solved by taking steps to ensure that the market remains unconcentrated than by imposing an interconnection access mandate. 4. Platform Access As noted in Chapter 5, platform access occurs when the government creates a standard and requires networks to provide nondiscriminatory service to anyone 36 Katz and Shapiro (1994, p. 105) note that "[i]n markets with network effects, there is natural tendency toward de facto standardization." 37 Faulhaber (2005) observes that in markets with five roughly equal-sized players such as the backbone market, the large players are likely to interconnect with one another. Economides (2005) recognizes that network economic effects give firms strong incentives to interconnect. Katz and Shapiro (1985, p. 429) note that "[a]s the number of firms becomes increasingly large," equilibrium in which all firms interconnect converges to perfectly competitive equilibrium. The Regulation of Last-Mile Broadband Networks presenting their data configured in accordance with that standard. The FCC man- dated platform access to last-mile broadband networks as part of its Computer Inquiries, in which it required the leading local telephone companies to "make available standardized hardware and software interfaces that are able to support transmission, switching, and signaling functions identical to those utilized in the enhanced service provided by the carrier." Th