Final word on MW2 beta rumors on IAMfourzerotwo is a blog update by Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling to "clarify the supposed 'news' coming out of GameCom this morning regarding no MW2 Beta." If you think this means he'll deny reports from this morning that there will be no public beta for the military shooter sequel you will be disappointed, as he says: "It is true that we have not announced a Public Beta for MW2, and that remains true unless I announce otherwise." He then indicates that a public beta will only happen if necessary: "Once the internal beta is completed, if for any reason we feel we didn’t receive the feedback, address the issues, or have the result we expect. We would consider pushing forward with a public one, however at this point only an internal Closed Beta is planned." So after clarifying that the "supposed news" is actually news, it seems the real goal here is to offer reassurances that the lack of a public beta will not hurt the quality of the game:

That said, any fears that no Public Beta will result in any quality loss in the final multiplayer game is completely unfounded; Multiplayer has always been and will always remain a major focus for the team at Infinity Ward and we would never ship a product we didn’t feel lived up to the high standards we hold ourselves to.

While we love public betas for all the obvious reasons, an internal Closed Beta allows us the extra freedom and flexibility to give the entire multiplayer a chance to be widely beta tested without requiring excess development time simply to prep the game for public release instead of an internal beta test which is ran on dev kits / test kits. That fact alone, allows us to have a smoother and faster process of iteration when addressing issues and pushing fixes out to beta participants.

This decision allows us to deliver a more polished experience, which in the end, is what we all want.