The above should have said "imploring" as if he were begging the States to fix a problem he created....

(dumb I can't edit a just-posted comment)

So - the principle that the Government had previously been and is now operating on (except during the Obama administration) is that intrastate calls and commerce are properly regulated by the State. Courts have repeatedly ruled this is the case. A normal person would think this is unobjectionable.

So, to say that Pai "caused" the present situation by returning to the Constitutional status quo ante is palpable nonsense. Further, the article states that Pai is "begging" States to take care of the problem, and presents no evidence to support the claim.

The only reason this article was greenlit on slashdot was an arbitrary shot against a Trump administration official that people don't like because of his stance on net neutrality. Remember that whole thing, the blackouts? If, we were told, NN wasn't imposed, an apocalypse was going to instantly destroy the internet as we know it? Curiously, as always, it turns out, that's not where the threats to freedom of expression came from.

There's another twist to this: why, exactly, are the regulations on the utilities, instead of on the prisons? Prisons are highly regulated already, are already under lots of constraints for what they can and cannot do, and States and the Fed executives are perfectly capable of replacing their service providers, and private prisons are already subject to contracts with the State - all problems can be fixed in a year with a flick of a pen of some mid-level executive. A perfectly coherent way of handling this would be to put the service contracts to a public competitive process like most things that are procured by the State, and be done with it.

(paraphrasing) "...is not that you provide a good or better product or service for the same or less money than your competitors. That's not important.

"The important thing is that you publicly virtue signal and work to support and promote every leftist cause proposed by the media and the political elite, disproportionately reward those who support the same causes, and be sure to give plenty of money to those causes.

"If you do not, you will be less able to do business with those of us who do, and chances are, you'll run afoul of one of the far too many laws that we can use via 'prosecutorial discression' to disproportionately impact anybody who doesn't support what we think you ought to be doing with your money.

"That's a nice company you've got there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it."

Gotcha.