The creation of the ICC was the result of widespread and longstanding anti-railroad agitation. Western farmers were the dominant force behind the movement, but Westerners generally--especially those living in small towns--believed that the railroads possessed economic power that they systematically abused. A central issue was rate discrimination between similarly situated customers and communities. Other potent issues included alleged attempts by railroads to obtain influence over city and state governments and the widespread practice of granting free transportation in the form of yearly passes to opinion leaders (elected officials, newspaper editors, ministers, and so on) so as to dampen any opposition to railroad practices. Some behavior was presumably less common; the muckraker Charles Edward Russell claimed that the railroad that served his home-town had refused to ship newsprint to a newspaper editor because the editor had attacked the railroad in print.

Various sections of the Interstate Commerce Act banned "personal discrimination" and gave the Commission the power to determine maximum "reasonable" rates. Equally significant, the Act required that rates be published.

William Jones, The Common Carrier Concept as Applied to Telecommunications:

In the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, Congress classified interstate telephone and telegraph operations as common carrier activities and empowered the ICC to regulate their rates. [202] The basis for the legislation, clearly reflected in the legislation history, was Congressional concern about the monopoly characteristics of these telecommunications industries. [203] The advocates of the legislation states:

Now the telegraph line and the telephone line are becoming rapidly as much a part of the instruments of commerce and as much a necessity of commercial life as the railroad. One of the greatest monopolies in this country today is a system of telephone and telegraph lines; and if it is right and proper to regulate the great railroad systems of this country in the interest of commerce, it is equally right to limit the telegraph and telephone companies. [204]

Why should not these necessary instrumentalities which the citizens have to use, which are monopolies in their particular lines of business, be required to make reasonable charges; and if they are [Jones A-78] unreasonable, why should not the citizen be permitted to appeal to the Interstate Commerce Commission to have it determined whether the charges are or are not reasonable? [205]

The Telephone Companies Consolidation Act of 1921 permitted the merger of telephone companies following ICC approval. [206] The statute was premised on the conviction that the telephone industry was a "natural monopoly." [207]