552
Opinion of Breyer, J.
Nov. 9, 1998 (Chief Executive Officer of AT&T, which here supports the Commission's regulations), cited in Huber 206, n. 611 (" 'No company will invest billions of dollars . . . if competitors who have not invested a penny of capital, nor taken an ounce of risk, can come along and get a free ride on the investments and risks of others' ").
I recognize that no regulator is likely to enforce the Commission's rules so strictly that investment literally slows to a trickle. Indeed, the majority cites figures showing that in the past several years new firms have invested $30 to $60 billion in local communications markets. See ante, at 516. We do not know how much of this investment represents facilities, say, broadband, for which an incumbent's historical network offers no substitute. Nor do we know whether this number is small or large compared with what might have been. Cf. FCC, Statistics of Communications Common Carriers 51 (table 2.7); FCC, Statistics of Communications Common Carriers 42 (table 2.7); FCC, Statistics of Communications Common Carriers 29 (table 2.7); FCC, Statistics of Communications Common Carriers 1 (table 2.7) (incumbents' similar investment over the same period amounts to over $100 billion); cf. FCC, 2000/2001 Statistics of Communications Common Carriers 51 (table 2.9) (total depreciated investment plus working capital equals $220 billion); ante, at 516, 521 (new entrants' market share provided by entrants' own facilities alone is 33%). Regardless, given the incentives, this independent investment would seem to have been made despite the "start from scratch" rules, not because of them. At best, such statistics do no more than show that at least some of the coincidences I describe below have, happily for the Commission and the public alike, come to pass. See infra, at 554, 556, 560-561.
The critics mention several other problems as well. They say, for example, that the Commission's regulations will exacerbate the problem of "stranded costs"—i. e., the need for a once-regulated incumbent to recover its reasonable, but now
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