If you think political realities don't have an effect on what can be accomplished with net neutrality, you're just being naive. I think this marks the point in time where (publicly at least) Google has moved on from the unfettered idealist stage to the more pragmatic realist stage. It might be a sad shift, but it was an inevitable one.
As pragmatic realist moves go, it is a great deal less cynically capitulatory than it could be. The part of the compromise that, by their previous words and actions, they could be reasonably thought to be more against is purposefully limited in scope and time.
The way I read it is that they are playing a move in the game which they hope gets a win in one area, with that move only costing their allowing another player to stall in another area. As compromises go, your limited win for their limit stall sounds pretty good to me. It is a lot better than the pragmatic capitulation of your limited win for their limited win. Descriptions of this as "they are selling out" are miss-characterizing this proposal and missing that difference.
However it was not a shift that Google had to take. Wasn't the whole point that FCC was gathering information to make up its mind? Who knows what would have been the _acceptable_ compromise for the FCC.
Maybe if Google had kept the fight, the FCC would have agreed to most of its points. As it is, it will be hard for anyone now to argue against this: they'll just be told "Look, even Google that was the most pro Net neutrality company things this is a good compromise, so shut up".
That's why people feel that Google has sold the netizens out (which personally I think it's a bit extreme: they are a company after all), and why it will be hard for the final law to be much different than what these two companies cooked up. So much for democracy.
They ceded the wireless world to the control of the carriers so it wouldn't be a stall so much as playing dead.
And a full reversal is certainly possible, it would imply a short-sightedness which is hard to reconcile with Google's policy history which tells us that it would take some major event (think the Chinese hacking incident) for them to reverse themselves entirely.
There is simply no way this agreement was undertaken lightly or without extensive analysis. Doubly so because it pisses off the technical elite (and they surely knew it would) both inside and outside Google.
