Mar 27: Comcast and BitTorrent today issued a joint press-release where they announced a collaborative effort to move beyond the current ‘reset spoofing‘ hooha. While Comcast will migrate by year-end 2008 to a capacity management technique that is “protocol agnostic”, BitTorrent agreed to develop fresh “optimizations” that will promoted as application standards.

Both BitTorrent and Comcast expressed the view that these technical issues can be worked out through private business discussions without the need for government intervention.

An ArsTechnica article notes that Net Neutrality advocates see this as an end run round the FCC’s current investigation of dubious network management practices. It quotes Public Knowledge president Gigi B. Sohn as saying “We applaud industry discussions and collaborations, but neither of these developments has any bearing on the complaint and petitions pending before the [FCC] on what rights users have on the Internet.”