Comcast has taken another step to contain damage after coming under heavy fire for its interference with peer-to-peer traffic last year. Comcast Corporation and Pando Networks, Inc. announced in a joint statement that they will lead an industry-wide effort to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” (BRR) for peer-to-peer (P2P) users and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

“Working together, Comcast and Pando can help lead the discussion about what consumers should expect in terms of a ‘P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities’ for P2P users and ISPs,” said Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s Chief Technology Officer, in the statement.

The two companies unveiled their plans to test Pando’s P2P technology on Comcast’s fiber-optic network at the same time with Pando’s tests on other ISP networks, for performance, speed, distance, geography and bandwidth consumption measurements, which will later be published in collaboration with P4P Working Group.

March 27, Comcast announced the restructuring of Internet traffic management, thus handling all data equally and objectively. It also launched collaboration with BitTorrent. The two companies have been working together on ways to improve BitTorrent applications for the Comcast network, which, with more than 24 million subscribers, is the largest cable TV and Internet provider in the U.S.

A simple test by the AP last October has found that Comcast appeared to interfere with the BitTorrent traffic in ways which poses ethics questions and also probably costs the company a lot of money. Specifically, instead of throttling BitTorrent traffic, the company appears to create spoof peers which interfere with the normal peer-to-peer transfers and significantly slow down or even kill some downloads. Furthermore, their test has shown that Comcast appeared to "impersonate" existing peers to divert packets.

Also, Comcast Corp. admitted to hiring people to fill seats at the Federal Communications Commission hearing in late April at Harvard Law School, thus limiting the public access to the event. It is a fairly common practice, although not exactly ethical, but Comcast said the move was made after the advocacy group Free Press urged people to attend in its behalf. The result was a room packed with sleepy people ever since the doors opened at 7 a.m., who’ve kept the seats warm until Comcast employees arrived at the scene.