Why does BITS require netprofm?

The BITS service (Background Intelligent Transfer service) does not start (error 0x80070422) if netprofm (Network List service) is not running, even though the latter is not listed as a dependent service. Question: Why? Under Windows 7, the latter was not essential to start BITS. I'm running as few services as possible, so I'd at least like to understand the reason for this (possible) necessity. I didn't find an explanation anywhere.