The paper analyzes the process of formulating the main principles of the state regulation of the telephone activities in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even though the emergence of the telephone in Russia matched the process of the whole unified postal and telegraph service’s organizing, crucial necessity of including the telephone into the system of the state management of communications did not become just a step in these reforms’ development. It caused the discussion on another matter, namely on the main principle of the system’s functioning, i.e. perception of the communications as the subject of the state monopoly. Thus, the Russian government’s attempts to adopt the telephone to a broadly settled system of the state regulation happened to be followed by the debates on neither administrative no technical, but on the legal and economic matters. Lately, they moved to the principle of the state monopoly in the communications sphere as a whole and to perception of the latter as a source of the state income. Nevertheless, during the analyzed period, the focus of all the disputes was made on responding to the private capital’s threat to the monopoly status of the government. However, its main concern was not the monopoly itself, but one of its aspects, i.e. the most commercially profitable way to build and use the telephone communications.