Where's The Franchise?

Google announced a massive expansion of fiber to the home. As the Washington Post announces:

After months of speculation, Google confirmed Tuesday that its ultra-fast Internet service will soon be coming to four more cities — Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; Nashville, Tenn.; and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. Those regions, along with more than a dozen cities in their immediate vicinity, will be the latest to benefit from high-speed Internet provided by the search giant. Google Fiber already sells Internet service with download speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second — roughly 100 times faster than the national average — for $70 a month in other cities such as Provo, Utah. Google had been considering expanding to as many as nine metropolitan areas. In a blog post Tuesday, Google said it was still in talks with five of those cities — Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and San Jose — and would decide whether to expand into those regions later this year. Construction in the four cities the company named Tuesday will begin in a few months, according to Google.

The questions are:

1. Does Google have to get Franchises and pole attachment agreements in all of these places or is there some "deal" that goes around that and if so why? This is a total of 12 major cities. In my almost 40 years of experience getting a Franchise especially with an incumbent is a long and costly process. Avoiding one is a miracle, namely very few miracles really happen, if any.

2.  At the same time Google is buying in to wireless. As we have argued wireless is much less expensive, requires no franchise, is already enabled by customers and has near equal capacity. So why waste billions on fiber? Do the shareholders care?

3. What is the Google strategy and what are its goals? It appears that they can afford to play many games. But to what end? They can control the distribution channel but then what?