DigitalMediaWire, April 15, 2008
By Mark Hefflinger

Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV company and a provider of high-speed Internet to 13.2 million subscribers, on Tuesday announced that it will lead an industry-wide effort to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities," which would "clarify what choices and controls consumers should have when using P2P applications as well as what processes and practices ISPs should use to manage P2P applications running on their networks." The company said it partnered with Pando Networks, a provider of peer-to-peer based content delivery network services, on the initiative, and will work with the company to help migrate to a protocol-agnostic network management technique by the end of the year.

Comcast came under fire after it was discovered that the company was throttling the peer-to-peer traffic of some of its customers.

Since then, the FCC scheduled a pair of hearings on the issue, and Comcast said late last month it would collaborate with BitTorrent and the ISP community to address network capacity management issues.

"We hope to get other industry experts, ISPs and P2P companies together this spring and publish the 'P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities' later this year," said Comcast CTO Tony Werner.

Notably absent from the list of partners are consumer advocate groups such as Free Press and Public Knowledge, which have been vocal critics of Comcast's bandwidth throttling practices.

"Consumers cannot trust Comcast or any other phone and cable company with the future of the Internet. Comcast has thumbed its nose at the existing consumer bill of rights -- the FCC's Internet policy statement guaranteeing access to all online content and services," said Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press.

"Now facing unprecedented public, government and media scrutiny, Comcast is desperately trying to change the subject with a few over-hyped side conversations."

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