elecom Markets: The 1996 Telecommunications Act market. The average interstate and international revenue per minute was still 17 cents, even though interstate access charges had been reduced to about cents per minute by 1995. 28 As this margin over access charges clearly reflected, the market was not fully competitive. Given the available long-distance margins, the three major carriers spent billions of dollars a year trying to lure customers from one another. 29 They also worked tirelessly to keep the Bell companies excluded from interLATA long-distance services, an exclusion that continued after 1996.30 Under the 1996 act, in order to be allowed to offer long-distance services across LATA boundaries from a given state, a Bell company would have to satisfy the competitive "checklist" of market-opening conditions and convince first the state regulatory commission, then the Justice Department and the FCC, that it had indeed complied. 31 For three and one-half years, no Bell company was able to gain such permission in any state. After five years, the Bell companies had gained access in only four states (see chapter 5). This slow progress can be attributed to the opponents to Bell entry, the long-distance companies and competitive local carriers, who could plausi- bly argue that the Bell companies had not done "enough" to facilitate entry into their local markets. Since there was no experience in such "market opening," there were no benchmarks, but simply endless arguments before the three regulatory bodies required to approve each application. This fea- ture of the 1996 act is now little more than a historical footnote, for by December 2003 the Bell companies had been able to persuade regulators that they had satisfied the act's checklist in all of the forty-eight mainland states and the District of Columbia. With this entry and the competition from wireless services, long-distance rates have declined dramatically. The independent long-distance company is now an endangered species, created by litigation, perpetuate