In my personal opinion, net neutrality is not best for Google, aside from the PR hit. They have the cash to pay for the premium bandwidth pipes, unlike hypothetical startups they're trying to compete with. Net neutrality lowers the barrier to entry for competitors: without it, startups might have to raise serious capital if they want to provide services with the latency and bandwidth Google does.

That may be true. One alternative hypothesis I have is this:

Google is a very able company, but it's core revenue comes from search advertising.

A company like Comcast will (sooner or later) be able to easily afford to build its own search engine that is good enough. Microsoft did this with Bing, and who knows, MS or others could even do a special licensing deal with ISPs.

If a search company (Microsoft, or any of the variety of competitors) were able to score a non-neutrality deal with a few major ISPs, Google's bottom line would take a massive hit.

So all this talk of Google making videos play faster for everyone using a mobile network is a red herring. The real issue is that most of Google's revenue comes from US search ads, and most of those ads are served via a small number of ISPs.

Fortunately for Google, the scale of running web search data centers has been so massive that there have been significant barriers to entry.

But as Microsoft showed, it's possible to build a search engine that is every bit as good as Google for 99% of users from scratch without any secret sauce, relatively quickly.

If you want a thought experiment, suppose Microsoft licensed Bing to Comcast at a 50/50 ad revenue split deal and Comcast offered its customers $20/month cheaper pricing to force all search traffic through Bing. My guess is that most customers wouldn't care too much, and I think Google realizes this and chose to put lots of energy into net neutrality under the guise of not being evil.