Google-watchers were agog recently about a job opening that appeared on the Internet search giant’s Web site: Google Inc. is looking for a “strategic negotiator” to help it secure “dark fiber” contracts in cities and over long distances “as part of development of a global backbone network.” The company also indicated an interest in setting up data centers in various places around the globe.

The job vacancy fed the already churning mill of speculation that Google is — gasp — trying to become a phone and Internet provider. Other indicators of late include last week’s announcement that Google and Web phone provider Skype Ltd. plan to join with a Spanish company to create the world’s largest wi-fi wireless network. And get this: Google recently invested in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology initiative to develop a personal computer with a browser that would cost less than $100.

When you put all those pieces together, it’s hard not to think “phone company.” Google already owns the best directory listings service ever built. Add a sturdy long-distance backbone, local wireless connections that bypass traditional phone lines and a cheap, dedicated device in users’ hands and — voila! — you get the 21st century’s version of a telco. Call it Ma Web.

It would be easy to view this as a sinister development. Phone companies, we learned long ago, want to be monopolies and control everything that happens on their networks. Google would make a formidable phone company if, in addition to dominating Internet search, it also had end-to-end control of its users’ Internet sessions. It could, for example, steer people to Google’s preferred sites and away from competitors’. Or it could wield market power by controlling not only customers’ search information, but also data on their phone and Internet sessions.

Google isn’t confirming — or denying — that it wants its own network, though company “evangelist” and Internet pioneer Vinton G. Cerf told the Senate Commerce Committee last week that the prospect of anybody building a new competing broadband platform “does not appear promising.” Still, it would be hard to blame the company for trying to lease the components of one. Apart from putting libraries and authors online and moving into underserved markets such as China, Google has nowhere else to grow except vertically in each direction: down to the plumbing level of the Internet and out to the consumer edge where the devices are.

Google’s problem, at some point, may be the same one faced by Standard Oil, General Motors Corp., Microsoft Corp. and many other giants who saw vertical integration as their only growth ticket: Sooner or later, the government will step in.

I’m betting it will be later, perhaps much later. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission seem to be content with the “anything goes” approach to telecommunications mergers and business practices. This stance began in the late 1990s and culminated last year with the merger of SBC Communications Corp. and AT&T Corp., a marriage that in 1997 was declared “unthinkable” under antitrust laws by Reed Hundt, then the FCC’s chairman.

These days it’s hard to imagine any kind of telecom deal, or even behavior, that would be considered “unthinkable” by the standards of the current Congress, FCC or Justice Department.

Take, for example, the current clamor by today’s Big Three telephone and cable broadband providers — the “new” AT&T, Verizon and Comcast — to set up new tolls that Google, Skype and other big Internet users would pay for the use of their pipes. The broadband oligopolists say their networks soon will be clogged by bandwidth-hogging sites that carry movies, TV shows, music and other data. They want the ability to mete out the highest-speed Internet access only to those Web sites that pay them for it.

Google would be justified in guessing that Congress will probably allow this to happen, so it’s already looking for ways around the traditional carriers. The best way, of course: Become one yourself.

All of which adds up to a future where there may be not one single Internet in the United States, but three — or even four, if Google finds its way around the toll-keepers and sets up its own rival wireless or fiber network. Each network would have its own favored Web sites, movies, music and content. And each would charge you more when you go “out of network.” If you’re thinking that sounds like some gruesome combination of the old broadcast TV business model and HMOs, you’re probably not far off.

Consumer advocates and academics joined Cerf in warning the Senate Commerce panel that we’re heading exactly in this direction unless Congress enforces some kind of “network neutrality” rule, requiring that Internet access providers cannot discriminate against any content provider through pricing or terms of access. “Nothing less than the future of the Internet” is at stake, Cerf said.

Google could idly wait for Congress to ensure network neutrality. Instead, it seems to be hedging its bets by cobbling together its own walled Internet that could compete against the others.

Mike Mills is CQ’s executive editor for electronic publishing.