f AT&T in 2005, the disposition of Adelphia's cable properties in 2006, and AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth in 2007. In each case, the FCC reaffirmed its 2005 decision not to mandate that last-mile broadband providers offer nondiscriminatory access to content and applications providers, pointing to the lack of evidence in the record that any network provider had engaged in such practices and concluding that competition was sufficiently robust to prevent network providers from discriminating against any particular content or applications (FCC 2005g, 2005h, 2006a, 2007a). In March 2007, the FCC issued a notice of inquiry seeking specific examples of network providers disfavoring particular content and seeking comment on the impact of any such behavior on consumers (FCC 2007d). In late 2007, news outlets began to report that Comcast was taking steps to limit the bandwidth consumed by certain peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent (see, e.g., Seattle Times 2007). Two advocacy organizations and an online video distributor that relied on BitTorrent filed separate complaints with the FCC challenging these practices. On March 27, 2008, while the FCC was considering these complaints, Comcast and BitTorrent announced that they had reached an agreement to work together to resolve the problems of network congestion asso- ciated with the BitTorrent traffic. After conducting hearings at Harvard, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon Universities, the FCC ruled in August 2008 that Comcast's actions contravened its 2005 policy statement in ways that did not fall within the exception for reasonable network management. Accordingly, it gave Comcast 30 days to submit a compliance plan describing how it would modify its practices (FCC 2008c). Networks in Telecommunications B. The Rationales for Regulating Last-Mile Broadband Networks The emergence of last-mile broadband technologies has a dramatic impact on the applicability of the regulatory rationales introduced in Chapter 4. The competition in last-mile services made possible by dig