Google, Verizon and the FCC: Inside the War Over the Internet's Future

As Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google forge ahead with highly publicized new plans to stream high-speed content like movies and TV shows to your living room, smartphone, telecom and cable giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have been intensely lobbying to maintain control over the broadband pipes they spent billions to build.

Comcast is going so far as to buy a rich content factory, NBC Universal, a deal that would create a $35 billion media and delivery juggernaut. That merger is currently pending before the FCC, and though public interest groups have been roundly critical, it's expected to be approved. An epic and escalating war is now taking place over the next era of broadband content delivery. Some skirmishes are playing out in the public eye, but others -- perhaps the most critical -- are far removed from it. In fact, very few people know that the highly controversial efforts by Google and Verizon to hammer out their own proposal for a broadband policy framework -- news of which broke only last month -- started nearly two years ago. The outcome of this ever-hotter war will have a profound impact on the way consumers access information well into the future.