No company has gone to greater lengths than Verizon in trying to stop the government from enforcing network neutrality rules.

Verizon is the company that sued to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order from 2010. Verizon won a federal appeals court ruling this year, overturning anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules and setting off a months-long scramble by the FCC to get enforceable rules into place.

Verizon has also been spending money to press its case with lawmakers. "An analysis by San Francisco-based data firm Quid found that Verizon alone spent $100 million to lobby Congress on net neutrality since 2009," NPR reported yesterday.

As the FCC nears the end of its new rulemaking process, Verizon is trying to convince the public that it loves the “open Internet” after all.

“As Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s Chairman and CEO, recently reiterated, Verizon is committed to an open Internet,” Verizon Senior VP of Public Policy Craig Silliman wrote in the company’s policy blog yesterday. “We provide customers with an open Internet on both our wireline and our wireless networks. We are committed to providing an open Internet for our customers and make that clear in a set of principles that we have posted on our website. You can review those principles here.”

But?

“But this debate has never been about an open Internet—everyone supports that. It has been about how heavily broadband should be regulated,” Silliman wrote.

In particular, Verizon wants to prevent net neutrality rules from affecting wireless networks. Of course, the FCC exempted wireless from the 2010 order’s strictest provisions and tentatively proposed to do the same for the new, weaker restrictions necessitated by Verizon’s lawsuit.

Under the original rules, this meant that wireless providers could block applications that don’t compete against their telephony services, and they didn’t have to follow anti-discrimination rules applied to fixed broadband. Verizon is both a fixed broadband and wireless company.

“Supporting an open Internet and supporting the imposition on wireless networks of a regulatory regime first written for the rotary phone are two very different things, Silliman wrote. “As our filings make clear—and as the ‘Open Internet Order’ in 2010 made clear—the FCC recognized that ‘wireless is different.’ Robust competition in the mobile broadband marketplace has led to a remarkable level of innovation that is constantly changing and accelerating. Moreover, unique technical challenges, including limited spectrum and other operational issues, require a different approach than the one-size-and-speed-fits-all approach that net neutrality advocates seem so fixated on… In short, Verizon fully supports an open Internet. We are and will continue to provide it to our customers. But we do not support the imposition of new, onerous net neutrality regulations on wireless networks.”

Verizon's actions conflict with its promise to provide an "open Internet," Karl Bode of DSLReports wrote today. Bode pointed to Verizon blocking tethering apps until the FCC ordered it to stop and Verizon blocking Google Wallet to push people onto its own payment platform. Verizon also temporarily blocked the Nexus 7 from connecting to its network despite open access rules that apply to spectrum used by Verizon.

Although the FCC tentatively concluded that it would continue treating wired and wireless differently, commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has signaled that he’s open to changing his mind. In a speech to the wireless industry this month, Wheeler said, “there have been significant changes in the mobile marketplace since 2010,” and that’s why the FCC “sought comment about whether these changes should lead us to revise our treatment of mobile broadband services.”

Google, which teamed up with Verizon four years ago to help prevent network neutrality rules from applying to cellular networks, has changed its mind. Google now supports banning “fast lanes” in which Web services pay ISPs to speed up their traffic, saying the rules should apply to both wired and wireless connections.

The FCC has finished taking comments on its net neutrality proposal and will presumably propose final rules within the next few months.