Unfortunately, I don't have a citation on this. I'm just appealing to common sense. If there are no regulatory barriers to providing some service, someone will

Unfortunately, I don't have a citation on this. I'm just appealing to common sense. If there are no regulatory barriers to providing some service, someone will do it, when they are able to do it profitably. Which means that they'll do it when it's actually worth doing. If there were no regulatory monopoly on creating telegraph lines, WU wasn't really that bad, and it wasn't really needed/worth it. (After all, the article does not make a case that WU successfully manipulated the election.) However, I think it's far more likely that there was a regulatory monopoly, as there is for modern telecoms.