440
Opinion of the Court
who had agreed with a carrier to a negotiated rate lower than the rate on file. When the carrier's bankruptcy prompted second thoughts about the wisdom of the agreement, the carrier and its creditors obtained the benefit of the requirement. Here, as in Jasper Wyman, supra, the carrier seeks to escape its burden by recovering for undercharges even though in effect it had no rates on file because its tariff lacked an essential element. The filed rate rule applied here to bar the carrier's recovery is the same rule that was applied to bar the shipper's defense. Nor is the rule somehow more technical or less equitable when applied against Security Services. It can hardly be gainsaid that a carrier employing distance rates without purporting to be bound by stated distances would be just as well placed to discriminate among shippers by measuring with rubber instruments as it would be by charging shippers for a stated distance at mutable rates per mile. While some may debate in other forums about the wisdom of the filed rate doctrine, it is enough to say here that the carriers cannot have it both ways.5
III
Petitioner is left to invoke the limitations on the ICC's authority to declare a rate void retroactively, and the "technical defect" rule.6 Neither is availing.
5 Both Justice Thomas, post, at 451, and n. 3, and Justice Ginsburg, post, at 457-458, argue that the effect of today's ruling is to validate secretly negotiated rates. Indeed, Justice Thomas goes so far as to suggest that our opinion would allow the ICC to circumvent Maislin Industries, U. S., Inc. v. Primary Steel, Inc., 497 U. S. 116 (1990), merely by declaring that a filed rate is void whenever another rate is negotiated, post, at 455. But our opinion does nothing of the kind. The Interstate Commerce Act states that carriers may provide transportation "only if the rate for the transportation or service is contained in a tariff that is in effect" under the provisions of the Act, 49 U. S. C. § 10761(a), and the Act provides for civil and criminal penalties for failure to maintain such rates, and to charge or pay them. See generally §§ 11901-11904.
6 Justice Thomas in dissent argues that we ignore petitioner's "broader argument . . . that the rule is not within the Commission's authority." See post, at 453, n. 4. But petitioner's question presented was whether
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