FCC Boss Ajit Pai Pretends To Care About A Prison Telco Monopoly Problem He Helped Protect

Over the last few decades, companies like Securus have managed to obtain a cozy, government-supported monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services. Like any monopoly, this has pretty traditionally resulted in not only sky high rates — upwards of $14 per minute for phone calls — but comically poor service as well. Because these folks are in prison, and as we all know everybody in prison is always guilty, drumming up enough sympathy to convert into political momentum has long proven difficult, so regulatory fecklessness has proven easy to come by.

Recent efforts to do something about it were scuttled by FCC boss Ajit Pai, whose former clients included Securus. Pai not only routinely opposed efforts by ex-FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to drive change in the prison telco sector, one of his very first acts as FCC boss was to pull the rugs out from underneath his own lawyers as they tried to support those reforms in court. The suddenly rudderless FCC ultimately and unsurprisingly lost due to a challenge by Global Tel*Link, which obviously wanted the status quo to remain intact. So now, while the FCC has the authority to cap interstate calling rates, the courts have declared it lacks the authority to regulate intrastate prison calling rates.

So it was odd to see Pai take to Twitter this week to first profess his breathless support for prison telco monopoly price gouging reform (clearly not true), and then state the fact his hands are tied in terms of actually doing something about it (something he’s largely responsible for):