More on the corporate borg’s colonization of your local community, even your own personal property space. If this isn’t a compelling issue over the fundamental question of who has authority over your local public’s ‘rights-of-way’, I don’t know what is. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer…

Norm Ockuly is certain that if he plunked a refrigerator on his tree lawn and left it there, Willowick would give him a ticket and make him pay a fine.

But the metal cabinet in front of Ockuly’s house on Bayridge Boulevard belongs to AT&T. And telecommunications giants are not easily brought to heel.

Despite complaints from some homeowners, AT&T has planted boxes - big and small, sometimes alone or in sets of two or three - on tree lawns across Northeast Ohio.

The cabinets are part of AT&T’s Project Lightspeed, which will extend fiber-optic cable into neighborhoods and add video services to telephone and high-speed Internet options. The $4.6 billion project spans 13 states.

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Upon returning from vacation last year, Ockuly and his wife were dismayed that workers had laid a concrete pad on their small Bayridge Boulevard tree lawn. Soon, the cream-colored cabinet - the size of an armoire or home-entertainment center - appeared.

“The people who want this should have volunteered to have it in their front yards,” Ockuly said. “It looks like an outhouse in the front yard. I wanted to put a half-moon on it and decorate it for Halloween.”

Adding to the clutter is a smaller metal box. And across the street, AT&T installed another outhouse-size cabinet.

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“The services are wonderful, but do you want that giant box in front of your house?” Willowick Mayor Richard Bonde said. “If you have two identical houses and one has an AT&T box on the lawn, which one would you buy?”

Officials in several cities said prohibiting the cabinets is not easy because federal and state laws restrict their control over what AT&T does in a public right of way.

There’s another article regarding this issue Here at DSL Reports, which includes a small photo as a sample example of these boxes.

There are better photos from the Geneva, Illinois lawsuit Here.

This matter was described in more detail in the previous USTV post “Fighting AT&T - A City Challenges Corporate Control”, as well as the related post “AT&T Assaults Michigan Municipalities: Whose Property Is It Anyway?”

The AT&T boxes are bigger than the Verizon boxes - and apparently have exploded on at least one occasion. See the insides of Verizon’s boxes Here