550
Opinion of Breyer, J.
sion will require the incumbent to lease its pair of twisted wires at an equivalent price or lower—whether or not the incumbent will have to spend more, in fact, to provide the twisted wires? The rules further discourage independent building or buying by assessing a special penalty upon the new entrant that does so, for that entrant will have to worry that soon another newer new entrant will insist upon sharing the incumbent's equivalent of that very element at a still lower regulation-determined price based on subsequent technological developments.
The Commission's system will tend to create instances in which (1) the incumbent's actual future cost of maintaining an element (say, a set of wires) will exceed (2) the new entrant's cost of building or buying elsewhere (say, through wireless or wires in electrical conduits) which, in turn, will equal (or even exceed) (3) the hypothetical future "best practice" cost (namely, what the experts decide will, in general, be cheapest). In such a case (or in related cases, where technological improvements, actual or predicted, tend to offset various cost differences), the new entrant will uneconomically share the incumbent's facilities by leasing rather than building or buying elsewhere. And that result, in the assumed circumstances, is wasteful. It undermines the efficiency goal that the majority itself claims the Act seeks to achieve. Cf. ante, at 509-510, 539.
Nor is the "sharing" of facilities (e. g., the wire pairs) that this result embodies consistent with the competition that the Act was written to promote. That is because firms that share existing facilities do not compete in respect to the facilities that they share, any more than several grain producers who auction their grain at a single jointly owned market compete in respect to auction services. Cf. Iowa Utilities Bd., 525 U. S., at 429 (Breyer, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) ("It is in the unshared, not in the shared, portions of the enterprise that meaningful competition would likely emerge"). Yet rules that combine a
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