402
Opinion of the Court
I
Petitioner Verizon Communications Inc. is the incumbent local exchange carrier (LEC) serving New York State. Before the 1996 Act, Verizon,1 like other incumbent LECs, enjoyed an exclusive franchise within its local service area. The 1996 Act sought to "uproo[t]" the incumbent LECs' monopoly and to introduce competition in its place. Verizon Communications Inc. v. FCC, 535 U. S. 467, 488 (2002). Central to the scheme of the Act is the incumbent LEC's obligation under 47 U. S. C. § 251(c) to share its network with competitors, see AT&T Corp. v. Iowa Utilities Bd., 525 U. S. 366, 371 (1999), including provision of access to individual elements of the network on an "unbundled" basis. § 251(c)(3). New entrants, so-called competitive LECs, resell these unbundled network elements (UNEs), recombined with each other or with elements belonging to the LECs.
Verizon, like other incumbent LECs, has taken two significant steps within the Act's framework in the direction of increased competition. First, Verizon has signed interconnection agreements with rivals such as AT&T, as it is obliged to do under § 252, detailing the terms on which it will make its network elements available. (Because Verizon and AT&T could not agree upon terms, the open issues were subjected to compulsory arbitration under §§ 252(b) and (c).) In 1997, the state regulator, New York's Public Service Commission (PSC), approved Verizon's interconnection agreement with AT&T.
Second, Verizon has taken advantage of the opportunity provided by the 1996 Act for incumbent LECs to enter the long-distance market (from which they had long been excluded). That required Verizon to satisfy, among other things, a 14-item checklist of statutory requirements, which
1 In 1996, NYNEX was the incumbent LEC for New York State. NYNEX subsequently merged with Bell Atlantic Corporation, and the merged entity retained the Bell Atlantic name; a further merger produced Verizon. We use "Verizon" to refer to NYNEX and Bell Atlantic as well.
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