Cite as: 525 U. S. 366 (1999)
Opinion of Breyer, J.
ful duplication of those hard-to-duplicate resources while facilitating competition in the remaining aspects of A-to-B railroad service. Indeed, one might characterize the Act's basic purpose as seeking to bring about, without inordinate waste, greater local service competition both as an end in local markets and as a means toward more competition, and fair competition, in long-distance markets.
For the present cases, the most important characteristic of the Act's purposes is what those purposes do not require. Those purposes neither require nor suggest reading the Act's language to change radically the scope of local regulators' traditional ratesetting powers. A utility's rate structure consists of complex sets of typically interdependent individual rates, the determination of which depends upon numerous considerations, many of which are local in nature and fall outside the Act's purview. The introduction of competition into a particular locality does not diminish the importance of place-specific factors, such as local history, geography, demands, and costs. And local regulators are likely more familiar than are national regulators, for example, with a particular utility's physical plant, its cost structure, the pattern of local demand, the history of local investment, and the need for recovery of undepreciated fixed costs.
Moreover, local regulators have experience setting rates that recover both the immediate, smaller, added costs that demand for additional service imposes upon a local system and also a proper share of the often huge fixed costs (of local loops, say, or switches) and overhead needed to provide the dial tone itself. Indeed, local regulators would seem as likely, if not more likely, than national regulators to know whether, when, or the extent to which particular local charges or systems of charges will lead new entrants to abandon efforts to use a local incumbent's elements, turning instead to alternative technologies. And local regulators would seem as likely as national regulators to know whether or when use of such alternative technologies in the local cir-
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