So all of the easement agreements got pushed through by google, and are being taken over by entities who wouldn’t have been able to get those easements due to commujity distrust of their company

I’d sue to have the easement revoked as a community, and for punitive damages hefty enough as a punch to Google’s nose to prevent that type of bad behavior from happening in the future

Not chump change, not cost of operations. Actual punitive damages enough to cut out any profits from the transaction and then some

Can I get an ELI5? My understanding is that easements are the fees that customers (either individual or community) pay to get the equipment/infra run to their property for service.

Are you saying that customers wouldn’t have paid those easements if it was the normal telecom company doing it, as opposed to Google? If so, what are the “damages” in this case? I’m not understanding for what you could sue.

As for damages

Say you have a old masonry structure like a masonry brick fence in the way of the easement

They can tear it down and will, and will not replace it with one of comparable quality if they bother to at all

Ive seen some beautiful 1950s work like that where it goes from amazing tradesmen quality masonry and iron fencing to jank 4x4’s and basically chickenwire on the easement, even 2 sections of the masonry/iron fence would take thousands to fix properly from what they did and there’s the likelihood they’ll do it again in the future.

Those are homes of people on fixed incomes or investments. They usually can’t keep fixing the damage. And those fences aren’t really decorations, its not even slightly uncommon for people to die from dog maulings in my area. Happens a few times every single year

Say you have a road, driveway, etc? At some point you will have a massive random pothole or speedbump because they’ll cut a trough right through it and fill it with asphalt not repour expensive concrete. I can in my neighborhood point out four locations where cable and fiber easement companies have done just that

I call bullshit at least as far as Gfiber is concerned. I live in a multi family building. For mine they had to run it under a driveway, sidewalk, and fence. They didn’t touch any of them. Then when my neighbor had theirs installed they just had to go under the driveway. It wasn’t touched again but unfortunately they had cut my line. So they ran mine again and like the first time they didn’t touch any of the three. I don’t know if my other neighbors in the building have Gfiber or not as I was affected at all and they didn’t touch any of the three if they did get it installed.