Opinion ID: 426192
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The ICC's Market Dominance Guidelines

Text: 50 The petitioners contend that the ICC's guidelines are at variance with the congressional directive to the ICC in the 4R Act to establish, by rule, standards and procedures for determining ... whether and when a carrier possesses market dominance .... Such rules shall be designed to provide a practical determination without administrative delay. Section 202(b). The panel majority held that the ICC's guidelines conform to the 4R Act's rule requirement, but declined to address petitioners' argument that the guidelines lacked the definiteness and predictability of standards and, hence, do not allow the ICC and parties to measure in a practical way whether there is effective competition in a particular situation. Western Coal Traffic League v. United States, 694 F.2d at 392. We have reviewed the ICC's guidelines and hold that they satisfy the congressional directive. 51 The ICC's guidelines do not, of course, enable a party to predict in each case whether market dominance exists. But, the object of the standard requirement in the 4R Act was not to establish hard and fast rules for every situation; the myriad individual circumstances in the complex world of rail transportation make that an impossibility. The guidelines do, however, provide a detailed guide as to what the ICC considers relevant, the placement of the burden of proof, and how to present a case to the ICC. We must remain cognizant of the Supreme Court's direction that the formulation of procedures [is] basically to be left within the discretion of the agencies to which Congress [has] confided the responsibility of substantive judgments. Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. v. Natural Resources Defense Counsel, Inc., 98 S.Ct. at 1202. Only experience will demonstrate the ability of the ICC to manage its new guidelines. As the D.C. Circuit noted in Atchison, T. & S.F. Railroad v. ICC, 580 F.2d at 640, the courts remain open if the Commission is slothful or unwilling to undertake appropriate reconsideration and fine tuning in the light of experience. At this time, we cannot say that the ICC has failed to fulfill the congressional directive. Hence, we affirm the ICC's guidelines.