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.

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?

The President announced 66 nationwide broadband projects, as part of the Recovery Act, that will increase high-speed Internet access to, according to the press release “tens of millions of Americans and over 685,000 businesses, 900 healthcare facilities and 2,400 schools in all fifty states.” But the administration needs to get moving on these projects rather than dribbling them out.

Yesterday, the President issued a memorandum making available 500 MHz of spectrum over the next ten years, to be offered at auction for wireless broadband services. It’s part of the implementation of the national broadband strategy laid out by the FCC in a policy document earlier this year.

Back in 2002, the Bush administration gave the phone and cable companies what they wanted and classified broadband outside the normal regulatory framework for two-way communications networks like phones. Fast forward to 2009, when the FCC came down on Comcast for blocking legal traffic on their networks. An appeals court overtuned the lawsuit, basically saying the FCC has no legal standing to regulate the Internet. Which, on its face, is crazy.

All the FCC needs to do to be able to regulate the Internet again is simply reverse Bush’s mistake. And indeed, an earlier Supreme Court ruling on Bush’s original move confirms this – the Court essentially said the FCC is allowed to reclassify services.

To reclassify, the FCC needs to hold a vote of its five member board. And the votes are there – Obama appointee Chairman Genachowski has been a strong supporter of net neutrality and its assumed the other two Democratic chairman would vote with him.

So, will the Chairman and FCC do it? So far, we don’t know.

While the DC Circuit Court ruling on the FCC’s regulation of net neutrality and broadband Internet would appear to require legislative action for reversal, a key litigator in the case tells FDL News that the FCC could, if they chose, work through the ruling on their own by reversing some of the policies of the Bush Administration which sought to deregulate the online space.

Most of the industrialized world pays less for it yet gets more. There is a stark imbalance between the rich and the poor’s access to it. Enormous and powerful corporations want the government to “reform” the system by delivering them lots of customers and goodies and then staying out of their way.

I speak, of course, of broadband internet.