Cite as: 525 U. S. 366 (1999)
Opinion of Breyer, J.
erty by depriving the owner of the fruits of value-creating investment, research, or labor. And as one moves beyond the sharing of readily separable and administrable physical facilities, say, to the sharing of research facilities, firm management, or technical capacities, these problems can become more severe. One would not ordinarily believe it practical, for example, to require a railroad to share its locomotives, fuel, or work force. Nor can one guarantee that firms will undertake the investment necessary to produce complex technological innovations knowing that any competitive advantage deriving from those innovations will be dissipated by the sharing requirement. The more complex the facilities, the more central their relation to the firm's managerial responsibilities, the more extensive the sharing demanded, the more likely these costs will become serious. See generally 1 H. Demsetz, Ownership, Control, and the Firm: The Organization of Economic Activity 207 (1988). And the more serious they become, the more likely they will offset any economic or competitive gain that a sharing requirement might otherwise provide. The greater the administrative burden, for example, the more the need for complex proceedings, the very existence of which means delay, which in turn can impede the entry into long-distance markets that the Act foresees. See supra, at 415.
Nor are any added costs imposed by more extensive un-bundling requirements necessarily offset by the added potential for competition. Increased sharing by itself does not automatically mean increased competition. It is in the un-shared, not in the shared, portions of the enterprise that meaningful competition would likely emerge. Rules that force firms to share every resource or element of a business would create not competition, but pervasive regulation, for the regulators, not the marketplace, would set the relevant terms.
The upshot, in my view, is that the statute's unbundling requirements, read in light of the Act's basic purposes, re-
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