546
Opinion of Breyer, J.
incumbents to sell retail services to new entrants at wholesale rates, thereby allowing newly entering firms automatically to compete in retailing if they so desire. § 251(c)(4). Third, it requires incumbents to provide new entrants "access to network elements," say, telephone lines connecting homes or offices with switching centers, "on an unbundled basis." § 251(c)(3). This third requirement permits a new entrant to compete selectively without replicating (or substituting) all of the elements the incumbent uses to offer the service in question.
Suppose, for example, the incumbent's control of certain existing cables, lines, or switching equipment would put the new entrant at an economic disadvantage because duplication of those "elements" would prove unnecessarily expensive. The new Act does not require the new entrant and incumbent to compete in respect to those elements, say, through wasteful duplication. Rather, the Act permits the new entrant to offer, and to compete with respect to, a related service by obtaining "access" to (and therefore using) those "elements" of the incumbent's network, while finding on its own other elements necessary to the service. It is as if a railroad regulator, anxious to promote railroad competition between City A and City B but aware that it would prove wasteful to duplicate a certain railroad bridge across the Mississippi River, ordered the bridge's owner to share the bridge with new competitors. The sharing would avoid wasteful duplication of the hard-to-duplicate resource—namely, the bridge. But at the same time it would facilitate competition in the remaining aspects of the A-to-B railroad service. That, I assume, is why the Act says that the "elements" that must be shared are those for which access is "necessary" and in respect to which "failure to provide access" would "impair" the ability of the new entrant "to provide the services that it seeks to offer." § 251(d)(2). See Iowa Utilities Bd., 525 U. S., at 392 (Commission must give "substance to the 'necessary' and 'impair' require-
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