GOP overhaul of broadband permit laws: Cities hate it, cable companies love it

Worth reading the letter from local govs as they lay out why this is such a complicated and slow problem: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/20251...

No big business in the US acts in good faith so the fact they are cheering this on tells me to be suspect. My read of this is they want to juice returns / timelines by avoiding bureaucracy and the city / local residents will deal with the inevitable mess.

Laws on public nuisance sound in good faith, its more about whose in positions of enforcement.

GOP would call this the deep state. Regulators and judges have been targets of modern GOP fascism.

From my perspective depending on where they want to develop it might be trivial to add something time consuming to a proposal such as eminent domain or easement reviews that will run out the shot clock and drown out reasonable questions by local governments. Local governance often is complicated by local (town), regional (county), and state level roles. Additionally depending on the area not all of these roles are even staffed by people working on it full-time.

It sounds like that’s what it will do. But that’s not the case. Why don’t you complain to your local ISP? It is likely that they are not upgrading the infrastructure that needs to be upgraded.

It is a way for massive cable companies to bypass local government, and may make the overall network experience worse. It might put local ISPs out of business that have been serving their communities for years.

30 years is nothing. There are cities that had to wait for thousands of years before they got fiber.