Cite as: 512 U. S. 218 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
F. C. C. 2d 308 (1979), following which it issued a series of rules that have produced this litigation.
The First Report and Order, 85 F. C. C. 2d 1, 20-24 (1980), distinguished between dominant carriers (those with market power) and nondominant carriers—in the long-distance market, this amounted to a distinction between AT&T and everyone else—and relaxed some of the filing procedures for non-dominant carriers, id., at 30-49. In the Second Report and Order, 91 F. C. C. 2d 59 (1982), the Commission entirely eliminated the filing requirement for resellers of terrestrial common carrier services. This policy of optional filing, or permissive detariffing, was extended to all other resellers, and to specialized common carriers, including petitioner MCI Telecommunications Corp., by the Fourth Report and Order, 95 F. C. C. 2d 554 (1983),1 and to virtually all remaining categories of nondominant carriers by the Fifth Report and Order, 98 F. C. C. 2d 1191 (1984). Then, in 1985, the Commission shifted to a mandatory detariffing policy, which prohibited nondominant carriers from filing tariffs. See Sixth Report and Order, 99 F. C. C. 2d 1020. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, however, struck down the Sixth Report's mandatory detariffing policy in a challenge brought—somewhat ironically as it now appears—by MCI. See MCI Telecommunications Corp. v. F. C. C., 765 F. 2d 1186 (1985) (Ginsburg, J.). The Court of Appeals reasoned that § 203(a)'s command that "[e]very common carrier . . . shall . . . file" tariffs was mandatory. And although § 203(b) authorizes the Commission to "modify any requirement" in the section, the Court of Appeals concluded that that phrase "suggest[ed] circumscribed alterations—not, as the FCC now would have it, wholesale abandonment or elimination of a requirement." Id., at 1192.
1 The Third Report and Order, 48 Fed. Reg. 46791 (1983), extended the Competitive Carrier Rulemakings to carriers providing service to domestic points outside the continental United States, such as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands.
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