In fact the law requires access to telephone poles. In one state Google got into a fight with incumbents over a policy where Google’s installers would be allowed to move incumbent’s equipment already on the poles to make room for its own, instead of following an existing process for having the incumbents move their own equipment. That’s probably a good idea assuming indemnification is in place, but Google wasn’t being denied access to the poles.
On the other side of the scale, Google Fiber has had the carpet rolled out for it in many places, for example being given for example free leases to public property for installing fiber huts: https://techliberation.com/2012/08/07/what-google-fiber-says...
> Google received stunning regulatory concessions and incentives from local governments, including free access to virtually everything the city owns or controls: rights of way, central office space, power, interconnections with anchor institutions, marketing and direct mail, and office space for Google employees. City officials also expedited the permitting process and assigned staff specifically to help Google. One county even offered to allow Google to hang its wires on parts of utility poles – for free – that are usually off-limits to communications companies.
See also: https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-google-fiber-is-high-speed-inter...
> But we believe Google Fiber’s most significant impact was to change the nature of relations between infrastructure providers and local authorities. Even after substantial deregulation in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and even as separate networks and technologies converged on a single internet-based standard, local governments continued to treat network providers as quasi-governmental public utilities, regulating their construction efforts and access to public rights of way with cumbersome procedures developed decades earlier.
One of the biggest examples of special treatment Google has negotiated in almost every Fiber city is exemption from build-out requirements: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-google-fiber-launch...
> Google Fiber has started with three neighborhoods in Louisville--Portland, Newburg, and Strathmoor (better known as the Highlands, where all the young professionals hang out). Residents of those neighborhoods can start ordering the service today by going to google.com/fiber/louisville. There are two packages to choose from:
While focusing on higher income neighborhoods where more people are likely to sign up for service seems like a no brainer in fact it’s an explosive political in most cities. That was the exact reason Verizon wasn’t allowed to deploy FiOS to Baltimore, and was a major reason for delays in FiOS deployment for NYC.
Looking at the details of how Google approached Fiber in various cities is a roadmap for what’s holding back deployment across the country. The problem was not incumbent lobbying—cities like Baltimore were falling over themselves to get Google to build Fiber. But what Google demanded in every fiber city was the sort of thing it got in Kansas City: elimination of the red tape that drives up costs. It’s no surprise that Google ended up mainly building Fiber in a bunch of red state cities.