Comcast Corp. denied accusations of unfair treatment towards its users through limiting peer-to-peer file sharing, but admitted to hiring people to fill seats at the Monday Federal Communications Commission hearing at Harvard Law School, thus limiting the public access to the hearing.

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.

“First Comcast was caught blocking the Internet. Now it has been caught blocking the public from debate,” said Timothy Karr, director of the Save the Internet campaign, in a statement. “The only people cheering Comcast are those paid to do so,’ he added, after almost 100 people have been turned away from the meeting.

Although admitting to paying people to stay in line, a company spokesperson, Charlie Douglas, said only a dozen people have actually been asked to do so, and the rest of the people attending the hearing came there at their own will.

Comcast started a huge controversy last year, when the Federal Communications Commission received a complaint regarding an unfair bandwidth policy by altering peer-to-peer connections. The company’s explanation was very simple: some broadband users utilize immense amounts of bandwidth which overwhelm the network capacity and threaten to harm the online experience of other users.

After Monday’s six-hour public hearing, FCC chief Kevin Martin said he did not make up his mind yet, and it is impossible to predict what the Commission’s decision will be, but pointed out to the necessity of acting as soon as possible.

The debate over the network operators’ right to prioritize traffic has been going on for some time now, and in 2008, the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act” appeared, which stands against “unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, content by network operators based upon its source, ownership, or destination on the Internet.”