Comcast, Pando to Work With Industry on P2P Bill of Rights

"For P2P to go legit and for it to be supported by ISPs and content owners, everybody needs to agree on a common set of principles," he said. "That’s really it. Technologies don’t ramp up in a marketplace unless all the players involved sit at the same table and understand common ground rules."

Industry Reaction
IDC analyst IdaRose Sylvester agreed that piracy and congestion should not be "confused as the same thing." However, she said in an email that she doubts Comcast’s motives for pursuing the bill of rights and views it as a way for the ISP to "appear to be proactive" in solving the net neutrality issue to make up for the "flack" it has faced regarding bandwidth throttling.

"On the surface, it reads as a very preliminary, very high-level ‘promise’ to be better citizens in working with everyone, consumers included, to solve the problem," Sylvester wrote. "Reading a bit further, I am quite concerned that Comcast is putting the initial onus on consumers to know what choices and controls they should have when dealing with P2P content."

She also wrote that it seems as if the bill of rights will spell out only what practices ISPs should use to manage P2P.

"I don’t see any ‘rights’ here, just the plan to create rules and what I, a consumer or ISP, can do wrong," she wrote.

BitTorrent CTO Eric Klinker said there is currently not enough information available for him or his company to decide whether they will support the proposal or participate in the bill of rights working group. However, he said it is important that any proposal be based on the concept of openness.

"Maintaining an openness and independence between ISPs and application developers, that allows the application developers to innovate without having to worry about how the ISPs will treat their product," he said.