The way this usually works, is there's an entrant into the market who decides it is cheaper to use the government to gain access to a network instead of buildin

The way this usually works, is there's an entrant into the market who decides it is cheaper to use the government to gain access to a network instead of building their own (Number Portability, Local Loop Unbundling). The government then says "You have to allow competitors access to X, and you have to do it by date Y". Then the companies get together and agree on how to do it because they agree that government dictated standards suck. There is usually some jostling around with someone wanting to run a centralized database for a nice per-transaction fee. Typically this is tossed out in committee, but not always.