488
Opinion of the Court
return on it was a sensible way to identify a range of rates that would be just and reasonable to investors and rate-payers. Equally enduring throughout the period was dissatisfaction with the successive rate-based variants. From the constancy of this dissatisfaction, one possible lesson was drawn by Congress in the 1996 Act, which was that regulation using the traditional rate-based methodologies gave monopolies too great an advantage and that the answer lay in moving away from the assumption common to all the rate-based methods, that the monopolistic structure within the discrete markets would endure.
Under the local-competition provisions of the Act, Congress called for ratemaking different from any historical practice, to achieve the entirely new objective of uprooting the monopolies that traditional rate-based methods had perpetuated. H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 104-230, p. 113 (1996). A leading backer of the Act in the Senate put the new goal this way:
"This is extraordinary in the sense of telling private industry that this is what they have to do in order to let the competitors come in and try to beat your economic brains out. . . .
"It is kind of almost a jump-start. . . . I will do everything I have to let you into my business, because we used to be a bottleneck; we used to be a monopoly; we used to control everything.
"Now, this legislation says you will not control much of anything. You will have to allow for nondiscrimina-tory access on an unbundled basis to the network functions and services of the Bell operating companies network that is at least equal in type, quality, and price to the access [a] Bell operating company affords to itself." 141 Cong. Rec. 15572 (1995) (remarks of Sen. Breaux (La.) on Pub. L. 104-104).
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