The protesting has begun outside of Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. This is in response to Google’s joint proposal with Verizon released earlier this week over net neutrality legislation. Mark Hachman posted the photo below to TwitPic.

The subject has dominated the tech headlines all week, and has taken a lot of heat throughout the Blogosphere. Google posted a defense of this in a blog post yesterday, aiming to dispel so-called myths about the proposal. That didn’t appear to do much to change opponents minds, however.

Protests are reportedly coming from groups including Free Press and MoveOn.org. If the buzz on Twitter is any indication, the protests have been disappointing so far:

On a related note, Google’s Vint Cerf chimed in on the subject today in an interviw with CBC News. He had this to say: "You can’t imagine how polarized the beginnings of those discussions were. I viewed the discussions with Verizon as an experiment or an exploration of how two rather polarized views of net neutrality could ultimately end up reaching some sort of compromise that both parties would be equally unhappy with."

"In some ways this represents not a stake in the ground, but rather the exploration of common ground and what that common ground might look like," he said. "I see it as a kind of homework assignment that Verizon and Google have attempted to complete just to show what happens when you try to come to some kind of common perspective."