About that Netflix flip-flop, it’s worse than you think.

On Jan. 14, 2014, the D.C. circuit court threw out an existing net-neutrality rule put in place by the Federal Communications Commission, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings rushed to assure investors the ruling was a nonevent. In the absence of an official net-neutrality rule, the likelihood of broadband operators blocking access or slowing down Netflix was nil.

“Part of delivering and expanding [the broadband business] for consumers,” he explained, “is having a really good Netflix experience, a good YouTube experience. That’s why people get higher-speed broadband. So I think actually our economic interests are pretty co-aligned.”

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s programming guru, added that if Internet carriers “were to contemplate blocking Netflix or other services, it will significantly fuel the fire for more regulation, which is not something they are interested in.”

Netflix elaborated in a letter to shareholders filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission: “[Internet services providers] are generally aware of the broad public support for net neutrality and don’t want to galvanize government action. Moreover, ISPs have very profitable broadband businesses they want to expand. Consumers purchase higher bandwidth packages mostly for one reason: high-quality streaming video. ISPs appear to recognize this and many of them are working closely with us and other streaming video services to enable the ISPs’ subscribers to more consistently get the high-quality streaming video consumers desire.”

People, this has been the adult view of net neutrality all along, and why intelligent persons have rightly called federal regulation a solution in search of a problem.

Then why, a month after this deluge of demurrers, did Netflix change its tune radically and call for utility regulation of even the upstream “network of networks,” which previously had not been considered part of the net-neutrality debate?

Because Netflix was then rolling out its own network, Open Connect, to bypass the public network in favor of direct tie-ups with last-mile providers like Comcast,Verizon and AT&T. This largely ignored story has been told in detail by a disparate group of analysts and lawyers including Dan Rayburn,Larry Downes,Jonathan Lee and Fred Campbell. Netflix effectively engineered a slowdown of its own service in late 2013 by relying on an intermediary with inadequate capacity, then waved a bloody shirt in pursuit of the direct-connection deals that today allow Netflix to distribute its content more efficiently and cheaply.

At least now we understand the famous but nearly indecipherable remarks of Netflix CFO David Wells at a Morgan Stanley media conference two weeks ago. To wit, Netflix had been happy to flog the net-neutrality meme while negotiating these agreements, Mr. Wells indicated, and then unhappy when the FCC took its rhetoric seriously and imposed sweeping Title II regulation.

And no wonder: Netflix can hardly be in favor of anything that curbs its own freedom to run its business as it sees fit. Yet the FCC’s “reclassification” of the Internet as a public utility potentially does exactly that.

The same miscalculation, by the way, was made by Google, Apple, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley smarties who kept their heads down as the traditional net-neut talking point morphed into a demand for utility regulation. They didn’t want to risk their images in a political brawl with lefty pro-regulation groups, so they kept silent and relied on the Obama administration and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to act responsibly. That was a bad bet.

Mr. Wheeler knows Title II is unnecessary and undesirable, but apparently felt it would be a personal defeat if he did not deliver something once the president had nosily intervened in favor of the “strongest possible” rules. Then, the only FCC majority available was three Democrats marching in lockstep with the president toward utility regulation.

Men spend their lives in Washington waiting for such a moment. Mr. Obama wasn’t going to come over and beat him up if he effectively scuttled the rulemaking and sent it back to the drawing board. But Mr. Wheeler, at age 68, was not ready for responsibility and so waved Title II through rather than risk standing alone and taking the heat.

In the Abilene Paradox (look it up), a group drives to Abilene for lunch because each thinks the others think it’s a good idea. Net-neut politics has now witlessly deposited the country in Abilene. It will be an expensively bought lesson for Google, Apple and others who flunked their civic responsibility to participate in an important public debate. And their schooling isn’t over.