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.

The news that Level 3, which has just partnered with Netflix on online video delivery, thinks Comcast is charging them for fast service, brings the debate on net neutrality to a whole new level.

This is my response to the question of what Obama could do now to address the country’s current problems, without the need to pass a bill through Congress.

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.

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.