416
Opinion of Breyer, J.
entry prohibition. See supra, at 414-415; Krattenmaker, The Telecommunications Act of 1996, 49 Fed. Com. L. J. 1, 15-16 (1996). In setting forth the second alternative, the Act recognizes that actual local competition might not prove practical; in some places, to some extent, local markets may not support more than a single firm, at least not without wasteful duplication of resources. See Note, The FCC and the Telecom Act of 1996: Necessary Steps to Achieve Substantial Deregulation, 11 Harv. J. L. & Tech. 797, 810, n. 57 (1998).
These alternatives raise a difficult empirical question. To what extent is local competition possible without wasteful duplication of facilities? The Act does not purport to answer this question. Rather, it creates a set of legal rules which, through interaction with the marketplace, aims to produce sensible answers. In particular, the Act permits new local entry by dismantling existing legal barriers that would otherwise inhibit it. 47 U. S. C. § 253(a) (1994 ed., Supp. II). Equally important, the Act promotes new local entry by requiring incumbents (1) to "interconnect" with new entrants (thereby allowing even a partial new entrant's small set of subscribers to call others within an entire local area), § 251(c)(2); (2) to sell retail services to new entrants at wholesale rates (thereby allowing newly entering firms to become "resellers," competing in retailing), § 251(c)(4); and (3) to provide new entrants "access to network elements," say, house-to-street telephone lines, "on an unbundled basis" (thereby allowing new entry in respect to some aspects of the local service business without requiring wasteful duplication of the entire business), § 251(c)(3). The last mentioned "unbundling" requirement does not specifically state which elements must be unbundled, a difficult matter that I shall discuss below. See infra, at 427-431. But one can understand the basic logic of "unbundling" by imagining that Congress required a sole incumbent railroad providing service between City A and City B to share certain basic facilities, say, bridges, rights-of-way, or tracks, in order to avoid waste-
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