402
Opinion of Thomas, J.
Justice Thomas, with whom The Chief Justice and Justice Breyer join, concurring in part and dissenting in part.
Since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, the States have been, for all practical purposes, exclusively responsible for regulating intrastate telephone service. Although the Telecommunications Act of 1996 altered that more than century-old tradition, the majority takes the Act too far in transferring the States' regulatory authority wholesale to the Federal Communications Commission. In my view, the Act does not unambiguously indicate that Congress intended for such a transfer to occur. Indeed, it specifically reserves for the States the primary responsibility to conduct mediations and arbitrations and to approve agreements between carriers. See 47 U. S. C. §§ 252(c), (e) (1994 ed., Supp. II). I therefore respectfully dissent from Part II of the majority's opinion.1
I
From the time that the commercial offering of telephone service began in 1877 until the expiration of key patents in 1893 and 1894, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone company—which came to be known as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company—enjoyed a monopoly. J. Brooks, Telephone: The First Hundred Years 59, 67, 71-72 (1976). In the decades that followed, thousands of independent phone companies emerged to fill in the gaps left by the telephone giant and, in most larger markets, to build rival networks in direct competition with it. Id., at 102-111. As competition developed, many municipalities began to adopt ordinances regulating telephone service. See, e. g., K. Lipartito, The Bell System and Regional Business 177-186 (1989).
During the 1900's, state legislatures came under increasing pressure to centralize the regulation of telephone service.
1 I agree with the majority's analysis of the unbundling and pick-and-choose rules, which were not challenged on jurisdictional grounds.
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