Cite as: 525 U. S. 366 (1999)
Opinion of Breyer, J.
policy-oriented effort to choose among several different systems, including systems based upon actual costs or price caps, which other systems the FCC's rules prohibit. A few examples, focusing upon some of the claimed weaknesses of the FCC's preferred system, will illustrate, however, how easily a regulator weighing certain policy considerations (for example, administrative considerations) differently might have chosen a different set of reasonable rules:
—Consider the FCC's decision to deny state commissions the choice of establishing rates based on actual historic, rather than hypothetical forward-looking, costs. See id.,
¶ 705, 11 FCC Rcd, at 15857-15858. Justice Brandeis, joined by Justice Holmes, pointed out the drawback of using a forward-looking, rather than an actual historic, cost system many years ago. He wrote that whatever the theoretical economic merits of a "reproduction cost" system (a system bearing an uncanny resemblance to the FCC's choice), the hypothetical nature of the regulatory judgments it required made such a system administratively unworkable. See Missouri ex rel. Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. v. Public Serv. Comm'n of Mo., 262 U. S. 276, 292-296 (1923) (dissenting opinion).
The passage of time has not outdated the Brandeis and Holmes criticism. Modern critics question whether regulators can accurately determine the "efficient" cost of supplying telephone service, say, to a particular group of Manhattan office buildings, by means of hypothetically efficient up-to-date equipment connected to a hypothetically efficient New York City network built to connect with NYNEX's existing (nonhypothetical) wire center. See, e. g., Kahn, Letting Go, at 93, and n. 135. The use of historic costs draws added support from one major statutory aim—expeditious introduction of competition. That is because efforts to determine hypothetical (rather than actual) costs means argument, and argument means delay, with respect to entry into both local and long-distance markets. See supra, at 415-416. Though
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