Comcast announced Thursday that it will no longer engage in filtering certain kinds of Internet traffic, according to a statement released by Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s Chief Technology Officer and obtained by iPO. Comcast had previously claimed the need to manage Internet traffic, but net-neutrality advocates claimed Comcast was secretly blocking competing video services.

Comcast said it will convert to a new technology by the end of the year that is protocol agnostic. In addition, Comcast will engage in an collaborative effort with BitTorrent to address issies with "rich media content and network capacity management."

"This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure our network management systems, but the outcome will be a traffic management technique that is more appropriate for today’s emerging Internet trends," Mr. Werner said in the statement.

Comcast’s change in policy came after the Associated Press confirmed the filtering process, and that led to intense scrutiny by the FCC Commissioners.

The move comes at an opportune time. Other companies have been looking into the benefits of P2P technologies to deliver legal video downloads to customers. In light of the vigorous FCC investigation, Comcast may have concluded the time was right to get out of the business of being the "judge and gatekeeper" of the Internet, according to net-neutrality advocates and move in new technical directions.

"This new architecture would enable many new and emerging applications and will be based upon an open, non-discriminatory framework that could interface with or support multiple technologies. We believe that P2P technology has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution, so we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks," Mr. Werner said.