Philadelphia - Comcast (NASD: CMCSA), 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."
Related Links:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080415/netu099.html?.v=41
http://snipurl.com/24jbn
(Ars Technica)
http://www.freepress.net
http://www.pandonetworks.com
http://www.comcast.com
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Comments
Interesting timing - Comcast and Pando -- please
Today, Comcast Corporation and Pando Networks announced that they will lead the industry to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for users and ISPs. With an FCC hearing on Comcast's anti-peer-to-peer practices scheduled for later this week, this is hardly a surprise. Once again, Comcast makes another sweetheart-sounding deal, but at the wrong time, and with the wrong sweetheart.
It takes a special kind of arrogance for a company that sells Internet Access to team up with another company that sells Content Delivery and together decide what rights and responsibilities that the world's Internet users should have.
As in its earlier "deal" with BitTorrent, Inc., Comcast's announcement today doesn't change any of the facts it faces: in 2006, it assured Congress that network neutrality laws were not necessary, saying it would not "deny, delay, or degrade" its customers in order to deal with traffic congestion. Within a year it was caught secretly doing exactly that! Even after a long string of deceptive and deflective statements and tactics, Comcast continues to degrade their traffic today.
As was the case in the BitTorrent "deal," neither Comcast Corporation nor Pando Networks represents the millions of customers and other members of the Internet community who were impacted when Comcast secretly launched its anti-P2P attack.
Today's announcement comes less than 48 hours from the US Federal Communication Committee's public hearing at Stanford University. There, the FCC is scheduled to hear from two panels of experts followed by two hours of public testimony on the Comcast incident specifically as well as similar industry practices in general.
No doubt we will soon see Comcast and Pando Networking executives start to explain why today's "deal" signals that Network Neutrality regulation is not needed in the Broadband Marketplace.
Net Neutrality
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