lose control; he wanted to be in control. In 1995, LDDS acquired Wiltel, a major provider of bulk bandwidth to other carriers. This made it the fourth-largest player in the business market, right behind Sprint. Wiltel's fiber-optic network had been built along the natu- ral gas transmission rights-of-way of its parent, Williams Companies. Its Points of Presence were, not coincidentally, often at the same locations as MCI's; Wil- tel was obviously selling bulk bandwidth to the number two provider. LDDS changed its name to LDDS WorldCom, dropping the LDDS name not long afterwards. (The WorldCom name itself was apparently inherited from IDB WorldCom, an international satellite network provider that it had acquired less than a year earlier.) With Wiltel's network under its belt, WorldCom was sud- denly a player to be taken seriously, a major force in the marketplace. It did not have a compelling presence in the fairly stagnant retail market, but it was a major supplier of bulk bandwidth to the burgeoning ISP market. Ebbers had jumped from a slow-moving train onto a fast one indeed. WorldCom's eventual collapse was, perhaps, inevitable, given the nature of its business. But that was not the telecommunications business, or for that matter the Internet business. WorldCom's business was acquiring companies. It was not good at integrating them into a whole; order processing, billing, and service were all quite disjoint. But there was no time to fix that; the company's compulsion was growth by acquisition. Once WorldCom was number four, acquisition targets became scarcer. MCI had, for several years, been partnering with British Telecom (BT). In 1997, BT made a friendly offer to acquire the 80% of MCI that it did not already own for $21 billion, though the offer was soon lowered to $17 billion [22]. WorldCom replied with an all-stock bid for all of MCI worth, at the time of the offer, about $30 billion. GTE Corp., the largest of the non-Bell local tele- phone conglomerates and by then the owner of BBN Corp. and its Internet