As noted previously, there’s a new episode in the Net’s long-running soap opera, “Which Side Of Its Mouth Will Google Talk Out Of Today.”

Most recently, Google is trumpeting the fact that its YouTube subsidiary pumps out 100 million video streams per day.  That’s almost equal to what techies call a petabyte - 10 to the 15th power - every day. Yowza! But then it sends out a senior official to tell the world that the Net isn’t scalable for video.

Actually, if you interpret his comments narrowly, he’s right: An IPTV product can’t really touch the public Internet without losing the level of quality consumers demand.

But the problem with Google’s position here is that conflicts with the company’s position in Washington. There, Google’s advocating neutrality regulations not only for the public Internet, but also for virtual private networks. These include the networks that telecom companies are building precisely because the public Internet doesn’t offer enough capacity.

It’s a convenient two-step and it may have something to do with Google’s overall business model, which is based on making a fortune by paying for less of the expensive Internet backbone than it uses.

Incidentally, there’s a wonderfully humorous part in this soap opera too. That’s when certain bloggers belatedly recognize that Google’s decision to jump into bed with the cable guys is also its first step away from funding the Net neutrality LOBBYING movement (or “funding Net neutrality lobbying efforts”).

Rest assured, this first step won’t be the last.