It is is a pretty large cap, but it’s clearly designed to profit from high-bandwidth users. There’s nothing inherently wrong with charging bandwidth hogs for their capacity; plenty of businesses charge on such a consumption model. The issue comes when this directly affects the ability of video-streaming sites like Netflix to carry out their business model, because of the cost-prohibitive nature of the service for individual users. Just three hours of HD video on Netflix would wipe out the entire 150GB monthly limit, for example.

You can say that the entire goal of Julius Genachowski’s pretend plan for net neutrality was to devise something that the telecoms could live with, while allowing him to make a defense that the Obama Administration fulfilled its campaign promise of Internet freedom. If they didn’t care about being taken to court over their plans, they would have written something far more air-tight. So instead, they came up with this heavily compromised approach. And Verizon sued them anyway.

The FCC officially approved rules that reportedly provide net neutrality protections to wireline Internet but not wireless services, and which include a host of loopholes for both types of service.

As if there weren’t enough things going to pot today, the FCC has decided to come out with a proposal to pretend to institute net neutrality regulations.

Henry Waxman, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, just released a statement announcing that he would drop controversial net neutrality legislation, and call on the FCC to use their authority to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service. This is a major victory for net neutrality advocates and a loss for the telecoms.

Rep. Henry Waxman has been trying to enshrine the terrible compromise promulgated by Google and Verizon into law, by pushing a truly terrible bill on broadband that strips the FCC of rulemaking and classification ability, and gives wireless Internet providers carte blanche to discriminate in favor of their products.

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.

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.