Salon’s Farhad Manjoo takes a look at Google’s $4.6 billion plan for an open wireless Internet.

This is a very big piece of news for two reasons: it shows where Google is headed, controlling indexing and pipes, and Google is only bidding under the condition that any other bidder adhere to agreed upon principles of internet openness (whatever that means).

Maybe this is the place where Google does an end-run around Microsoft or, maybe they did it a while ago.

More on this at CNN Money.