I agree with Erik Loomis on this one. The purpose of this whole thing from Verizon’s perspective was to bust the union. They wanted to slash wages and benefits. When the workers went on strike, they threatened to cut off their health insurance. But the workers stuck together, and the replacement workers couldn’t do the same job without tremendous delays. My grandmother had a Verizon phone problem back in Philadelphia, they weren’t going to come out to service her phone line until the middle of next month. This was damaging to Verizon’s brand.

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.

AT&T and Verizon are now blocking Wikileaks sites internally, too. Maybe we can just find out who is spying for the government based on which companies implement these kinds of blocks on Wikileaks?

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.

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.

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.