Some advocacy groups are scoffing at Comcast Corp.’s announcement that it’s working with another file-sharing provider to create a “bill of rights.”

Public Knowledge and Free Press say Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, is trying to avoid FCC oversight of its Internet traffic management practices, which have come under fire. Indeed, Comcast’s announcement came just two days before the FCC is scheduled to hold a hearing at Stanford University. The hearing on Thursday will explore whether ISPs can control the content that traverses their networks.

On Tuesday, Comcast and Pando Networks Inc. said they’re creating a bill of rights for P2P users and ISPs. Comcast already is talking with BitTorrent, after BitTorrent accused the cable company of deliberately slowing P2P traffic.

Advocacy groups expressed skepticism over the Pando news, while some analysts called it a “breakthrough.”

Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, said Comcast’s work with BitTorrent and Pando “is long on rhetoric and short on detail.”

“The fact that Comcast is trying to come up with a bill of rights for customers is ludicrous,” Sohn said in a prepared statement. “Comcast should fix its internal problems with customers being kicked off the Internet service for no good reason ... before it starts pretending to solve the problems of the Internet that it helped to cause.”

Free Press made a similar observation.

"Comcast has thumbed its nose at the existing consumer bill of rights," said Marvin Ammori, the association’s general counsel. "Now facing unprecedented public, government and media scrutiny, Comcast is desperately trying to change the subject."

But Scott Cleland, an independent analyst, said the Comcast-Pando deal achieves two aims. First, a bill of rights should get ISPs to understand that users are free to access legal applications and content. Second, he said, P2P users should grasp that their usage “cannot detrimentally affect the rights of non-P2P users' expectations of quality of service. The brilliance of this announcement is that it embeds the truism that ‘with freedom comes responsibility’ in a civil society.”

Comcast and Pando said they will work with industry experts, other ISPs and P2Ps, content providers and more to compose the bill of rights.