(IDG) -- Almost everyone has heard of the political marriage pairing Republican strategist and conservative talk show host Mary Matalin with colorful Bill Clinton defender James Carville.

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But Matalin and Carville aren't the only Washington power couple who must be having political shouting matches over dinner these days.

Take a look at Susan Molinari and Bill Paxon, married former members of Congress who are suddenly on opposite sides of a most unlikely issue -- broadband Internet access.

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Molinari, a former rising star from Staten Island, N.Y., and keynote speaker at the 1996 Republican National Convention, is co-executive director of a group called the Internet Advancement Coalition. Paxon, who gave up his Buffalo, N.Y., seat shortly after Molinari did, is a paid consultant to a group called the Competitive Broadband Coalition (CBC).

Sounds innocuous enough until you realize what these two groups are all about. The Internet Advancement Coalition, or iAdvance, is heavily funded by regional Bell operating companies SBC Communications and Bell Atlantic to lobby for a change in telecom law that would enable RBOCs to build long-distance data networks -- in other words, Internet backbones -- before they have long-distance voice authority. The CBC is heavily funded by AT&T, MCI WorldCom and others precisely to stop the RBOCs from gaining this authority.

Of course, neither group publicly states its goals that way. The iAdvance group says it's all about "Bringing the Internet up to speed for all Americans!" The CBC says it is "dedicated to protecting the competitive environment in which the Internet was born and continues to evolve."

But those aren't the only players. Consider a third group with the provocative name "Hands Off the Internet." In ads and on the Web, the group describes itself as "a coalition of 'Net users" who believe "the Internet's phenomenal growth stems from the ability of entrepreneurs to expand consumer choices and opportunities without worrying about government regulation." But critics charge that the group is nothing more than a front for AT&T to lobby against regulations forcing it to open its vast cable networks to ISPs.

"Hands Off the Internet is a completely AT&T-funded puppet," says Greg Simon, co-executive director of yet another group � the openNET Coalition.

Oh, and what's that group? The openNET Coalition says it is "dedicated to promoting the rights of all consumers to obtain affordable, high-speed access to the Internet from the provider of their choice." But its critics say the coalition is just a lobbying front for America Online, which lacks AT&T's last-mile links, and GTE, which habitually fights AT&T in court, so the companies can reach end users via the cable plant that AT&T is spending billions to upgrade.

Figuring out the code words

Confused? You needn't be. Here are the basic rules of how big corporations jockey for position in the Washington telecom power struggle, and how this struggle will really affect your users' ability to get high-speed access in the future.

Each of these four groups � and several others � uses the universally expressed desire to improve the Internet as its raison d'�tre, even when what each group is really aiming at is a technical change in the nation's telecom laws.

Each group employs former members of Congress and top officials of the Reagan, Bush or Clinton administrations to pitch its message. But forget Republican vs. Democratic distinctions � you can't predict which party partisans will join which group. Some of the groups have hedged their bets and hired well-known operatives from both parties.

Code words are important. Each group appears at first blush to embrace the almost universal desire of 'Netizens to be "deregulated."

Yet if you look closely, the words "competitive" and "open" usually wind up meaning "Let's put more regulations on our opponents," while "freedom" is often a euphemism for "Don't regulate me, regulate the other guy."

Make no mistake, though: These groups are getting through to somebody on Capitol Hill. There are currently no fewer than seven bills in Congress with titles including the words "Internet Freedom," "Internet Growth" and "Broadband Internet Relief." Yet most of them have little or nothing to do with e-commerce taxes or the regulation of Internet content. Instead, they're actually bills loosening or tightening regulations on different types of telecom giants.

Some political insiders say all this activity is nothing more than an attempt by enormous carriers to leverage an interest in the Internet in order to get politicians to pick winners and losers in the ongoing guerrilla war of telecom regulation. To see how this works, take a look at the four principal lobbying groups, what companies support them and their policy goals.

Notice how AT&T, now the nation's largest cable company, supports a deregulation effort (Hands Off the Internet) for cable modems but takes a proregulation � er, "competitive" � stance for digital subscriber line services (CBC). For most of the Bell companies, it's the reverse. They support a deregulation group (iAdvance) for DSL but a proregulation � er, "open" � stance on cable modems (openNet Coalition). "These companies have done everything to increase competition for their competitors and decrease competition for themselves. That's all it's been about," says Neils Erich, co-chairman of the Telecom Task Force for the San Francisco Planning & Urban Research Association.

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