“The FCC said in a notice it was removing ‘outmoded regulations’ on telegraphs effective in November.” And none too soon: “The last Western Union telegram in the United States was sent in 2006” and the “last major telegram service worldwide ended in India in 2013.” Reuters reports:

AT&T Inc, originally known as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, in 2013 lamented the FCC’s failure to formally stop enforcing some telegraph rules.

“Regulations have a tendency to persist long after they outlived any usefulness and it takes real focus and effort to ultimately remove them from the books even when everyone agrees that it is the common sense thing to do,” the company said.

In 2011, I observed that Connecticut had yet to get around to repealing old state laws like those regulating the working conditions of telegraph messengers (cross-posted and adapted from Overlawyered).