Cite as: 525 U. S. 366 (1999)
Opinion of Souter, J.
at 388-389, the Commission explicitly addressed the consequences that would follow from requiring an entrant to satisfy the necessity and impairment criteria by showing that alternative facilities were unavailable at reasonable cost from anyone except the incumbent LEC. First Report & Order ¶ 283, 11 FCC Rcd, at 15642. To require that kind of a showing, the Commission said, would encourage duplication of facilities and personnel, with obvious systemic costs. Ibid. The Commission, in other words, was approaching the task of giving reasonable interpretations to "necessary" and "impair" by asking whether Congress would have mandated economic inefficiency as a limit on the objective of encouraging competition through ease of market entry. The Commission concluded, without any apparent implausibility, that the answer was no, and proceeded to implement the necessity and impairment provisions in accordance with that answer.
Before we conclude that the Commission's reading of the statute was unreasonable, therefore, we have to do more than simply ask whether Congress would probably have legislated the necessity and impairment criteria in their weak senses. We have to ask whether the Commission's further question is an irrelevant one, and (if it is not), whether the Commission's answer is reasonably defensible. If the question is sensible and the answer fair, Chevron deference surely requires us to respect the Commission's conclusion. This is so regardless of whether the answer to the Commission's question points in a different direction from the answer to the Court's question; there is no apparent reason why deference to the agency should not extend to the agency's choice in responding to mutually ill-fitting clues to congressional meaning. This, indeed, is surely a classic case for such deference, the statute here being infected not only with "ambiguity" but even "self-contradiction." Ante, at 397. I would accordingly respect the Commission's choice to give primacy to the question it chose.
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