A newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the nation's most important media regulator, appears before a confab of television big wigs and reads the assembly the riot act.

The chairman opens by making it clear that he is not impressed with television programming, which in the course of his speech he characterizes as "a vast wasteland".

Last week, we touched upon the net neutrality issue to help explain and add context to the buzz around a forthcoming Google-Verizon deal. That "deal," as you may have heard, was announced on Monday.

The first thing to note is that it's not an actual deal.

In recent weeks, top officials from the Federal Communications Commission have held closed-door meetings to negotiate with the country’s biggest communications companies and online service providers on how the Internet should be regulated. In a statement today, the FCC said it had called off those talks, saying the effort "has been productive on several fronts, but has not generated a robust framework to preserve the openness and freedom of the Internet."