Having acknowledged it hampers file-sharing to manage network traffic, Comcast Corp. said Thursday it is now in talks with the file-sharing service BitTorrent Inc. to come up with better ways to transport large files over the Internet. Peer-to-peer file-sharing, once synonymous with online privacy, "has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution," said Tony Werner, Comcast's chief technology officer. "So we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks." Comcast is the largest cable company and the second-largest Internet service provider in the U.S. Since an Associated Press story brought the issue to light in October, Comcast has been under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission for secretly delaying some of the traffic between computers that share files.

Other service providers have also blocked or slowed peer-to-peer traffic as the growing popularity of video and other bandwidth-heavy downloads clog up network traffic.

On Thursday, BitTorrent and Comcast said they want to work out these issues privately, without the need for government intervention.

By the end of this year, Comcast said it will change the way it manages network traffic so it will treat all files equally, whether they are videos, songs or e-mail, rather than target a specific protocol like BitTorrent. Werner said this will be "more appropriate for today's emerging Internet trends."

For its part, BitTorrent acknowledged that service providers have to manage their networks somehow, especially during peak times.

"While we think there were other management techniques that could have been deployed, we understand why Comcast and other ISPs adopted the approach that they did initially," said Eric Klinker, BitTorrent's CTO.

- Barbara Ortutay, AP Business Writer in New York.

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