Amongst all the craziness, a bit of good news

The USG and telecommunications companies did not obtain the right to put their towers up wherever they wanted today.

The extremely ugly telecommunications bill did not get a vote today in the House Rules Committee. That does not mean it is gone forever, but it does mean there was enough concern from constitutents that the members did not vote it out of committee, and it has been postponed, hopefully for a long time.

I told you about this bill and some other efforts that are rather horrifying last December, which will give you all the background you might desire on this matter:

The TELECOM uber spying plan is being pushed by the FCC, NTIA and Congress, to remove all local authority over where the towers go, their health effects and who gets control of all that data

I also shared a post by Kyle Young about the issue here and an earlier need to contact Congress:

URGENT ACTION REQUESTED: Congressional attempt to take telecom tower permitting authority away from local officials

And today I share a post by Reinette Seinum about what happened today:

BREAKING NEWS AGAIN: WE WON!

She explains:

WHAT WAS HR 2289

If you haven’t heard me blather on about this over and over already, let me be direct about what this bill actually was, because the name, the American Broadband Deployment Act, was carefully designed to sound reasonable. It was not reasonable. It was a corporate bulldozer dressed up in patriotic language.

HR 2289 would have effectively eliminated local government authority over where cell towers, small cells, and antennas could be placed, next to your home, next to your child’s school, in the middle of your neighborhood, without your community having any meaningful say. Local governments under this bill would have been legally required to approve virtually any antenna on any existing structure: utility poles, light poles, overhead wires, apartment buildings, single-family homes, and schools….

It also stripped most wireless facilities of any requirement to undergo review under the National Environmental Policy Act or the National Historic Preservation Act, meaning NO environmental review, no health impact review, nothing. The telecom industry would have been handed a key to every neighborhood in America, with the federal government holding the door open.

As attorney Odette Wilkens, president of Wired Broadband, put it plainly: “The reason for HR 2289 is to prevent any further litigation and any further successes that people have had across the country in stopping cell towers.”

There it is. No euphemisms. The entire purpose of the bill was to shut down the resistance that has been winning.

WHO WAS PUSHING IT AND WHO PUSHED BACK

On April 13, just one week before the scheduled Rules Committee vote, CTIA, The Wireless Association, representing AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Apple, sent a letter to House leadership demanding they bring HR 2289 to the floor immediately, framing it as essential to “America’s position in the global AI race.”

The AI race. There it is again. The same justification used to strip your broadband dollars, reroute fiber to data centers, and build heat islands in neighborhoods across the country. Now it was being used to override your local government’s authority over cell towers on your street….

CELEBRATE, BUT NOT TOO LONG

This bill will come back. It has come back before. HR 2289 is essentially the same legislation as HR 3357, which was proposed in 2023 and killed by the same coalition of local governments. They renamed it, expanded it, waited for a favorable political moment, and tried again.

They will try again.

The FCC is simultaneously advancing its own rulemaking, Notice 25-276, which would accomplish many of the same goals through regulatory action rather than legislation, broadly preempting state and local authority over cell tower siting, design, and operation. That fight is not over.

So now, if you skipped my first substack article linked above (from December 8) you may want to read it now to learn about the variety of tricks that have been rolled out on this issue so the government and telecom companies can legally know everything we do online and on the phone:

• Many bills for Congress to pass that already made it through the House Energy and Commerce committee, unanimously

• An FCC attempt to bypass legislation and roll out what they want by decreee: agency regulation.

• A Commerce Department National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)effort

If this reminds you of the multiple tracks taken by Bayer to get itself a liability shield, it should, because it uses the same methodology: fight for the same things in every possible venue—when a win in just one will give the industry and/or Uncle Sam exactly what it wants.

Furthermore, both the Bayer liability shield issue and this telecom issue are being fought to strip away the consitutional authority of state and local governments.

We had an important win today. Let’s keep our eyes peeled to see where this heads next.