400
Opinion of Souter, J.
it seeks to offer'; and it cannot realistically be said that the network element enabling it to raise profits to 100% is 'necessary,' " ante, at 390. A service is surely "necessary" to my business in an ordinary, weak sense of necessity when that service would allow me to realize more profits, and a business can be said to be "impaired" in delivery of services in an ordinary, weak sense of impairment when something stops the business from getting the profit it wants for those services.
Not every choice of meaning that falls within the bounds of textual ambiguity is necessarily reasonable, to be sure, but the Court's appeal to broader statutory policy comes up short in my judgment. The Court says, with some intuitive plausibility, that "the Act requires the FCC to apply some limiting standard, rationally related to the goals of the Act, which it has simply failed to do." Ante, at 388. In the Court's eyes, the trouble with the Commission's interpretation is that it "allows entrants, rather than the Commission, to determine" necessity and impairment, ante, at 389, and so the Court concludes that "if Congress had wanted to give blanket access to incumbents' networks on a basis as unrestricted as the scheme the Commission has come up with, it would not have included § 251(d)(2) in the statute at all," ante, at 390.
The Court thus judges the reasonableness of the Commission's rule for implementing § 251(d)(2) by asking how likely it is that Congress would have legislated at all if its point in adopting the criteria of necessity and impairment was to do no more than require economic rationality, and the Court answers that the Commission's notion of the congressional objective in using the ambiguous language is just too modest to be reasonable. The persuasiveness of the Court's answer to its question, however, rests on overlooking the very different question that the Commission was obviously answering when it adopted Rule 319. As the Court itself notes, ante,
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