Of course, now that we have the next generation of wireless technologies, Google and the telecoms will do their best to control and monetize them. Not only have they persuaded gullible tea partiers to join the cause, taking advantage of baseless fears about government takeovers of the Internet (strike government and replace with corporate and you’re on to something), but they’re getting help from prominent Democrats as well.

Two FCC Commissioners and one US Senator slammed the Google-Verizon joint policy agreement and strongly endorsed the principle of net neutrality last night at a hearing before hundreds of citizens in Minneapolis, giving the Chairman of the federal agency Julius Genachowski all of the support he would need to regulate broadband Internet, if he so chose.

Remember, this is not a cell phone. And you shouldn’t be discriminated against the choice of a small, handheld device or a device which sits on your desk; the data you’re making or retrieving is moving across the same networks, from you to me and back again.

Net neutrality advocates appear to have an ally in the White House. Marvin Ammori, a professor at the University of Nebraska who has been unsparing in his criticism of the FCC for failing to act and reclassify broadband so they can regulate it, found himself pleased with what the Administration has been saying in the days since the Google-Verizon announcement.

On a conference call, CEOs Eric Schmidt of Google and Ivan Seidelberg of Verizon both announced the policy agreement. While both of them criticized the New York Times story from last week and other reports about the two corporations backing down from a commitment to net neutrality (“almost all of which has been completely wrong,” Schmidt said, and asked reporters that they base their criticism “on what is actually announced today”), what they produced doesn’t necessarily conflict with the story.

While Alan Grayson hides behind a belief that statutory law governing net neutrality would be safer from rollback than a change in classification at the FCC, John Kerry takes the realistic view, maintaining that the FCC’s power of regulation is the best if imperfect solution.

The world’s biggest media companies want to define how people will get content over the Internet. Money talks; independent content creators: take a walk. A mega-deal is reportedly in the works in which Verizon will favor Internet content from Google because Google has the spare cash to pay for preferred access. And this is being touted as the model for how content providers and Internet service providers will do business. We have seen the future, and it is exactly like the past.

The FCC had been meeting with lobbyists for the telecoms, broadcasters and Internet giants like Google for the past week, trying to accommodate them in selling out the Internet. This only worked in getting net neutrality activists to recognize what a disaster was looming in just a few short weeks. Free Press and others engaged the FCC directly with a variety of methods.

Today, we learn that the FCC has called off the backroom meetings.

The first word we heard about the Google-Verizon deal was that they would keep basic net neutrality protections for computer-based Web browsing, but not extend it to mobile devices. But the latest news is that the deal would put tiers on the entire Internet.

I got a call yesterday from a telecommunications lobbyist who had an interesting and very plausible theory regarding the handling of the decision on net neutrality: What if Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, is simply running out the clock?