It has often been competitors that have conviced the government to step in. This raises the question of who is benefiting from the intervention. In a competitive system the consumer benefits from inovation from any company. One could easily imagine a monopoly, like the one phone company charging much more for a service than they might under a multi-provider system. How is software a natural monopoly.
Software is much more efficient with uniformity.
Uniformity benefits the users because they only have to learn one set of arbitrary quirks. Consider phones and cars. These two ubiquitous tools have essentially one interface each. On all phones the 12 main buttons are all in the same positions and labeled the same. This uniformity is key to the interchangability of skills with these tools.