In less than a year, Comcast has gone from a company that was using forged packets to throttle upstream P2P, to one that's promising to embrace P2P as if it were a long lost Uncle. The company has been heavily promoting their involvement in the development of a new "P4P" architecture by Pando Networks that only serves file parts from local peers to reduce hops. The coalition involves some fifty organizations, including AT&T, Verizon and many P2P vendors.

Pando and the new coalition believes they can speed up P2P transfers by as much as 235% across US cable networks and up to 898% across international broadband networks. In Verizon tests, Pando increased the percentage of data routed internally across their networks from 2.2% to 43.4%, which they claim reduced inter-ISP data transfers by an average of 34% (up to 43.8 % in the US and 75.1% internationally).

Comcast's involvement in the Pando P2P trials falls under the umbrella of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, which Comcast just joined in order to develop a "new framework" of systematic cooperation between P2P vendors and ISPs. Comcast this week also began investing in Seattle-based startup GridNetworks, which focuses on P2P video delivery. Next month they'll expand Pando testing. Why the sudden P2P love?

The FCC investigation of Comcast's traffic shaping (and the beating the took from network neutrality advocates) obviously started the ball rolling. But alongside the desire to improve P2P efficiency, I'd argue we're seeing a new and highly coordinated effort to eradicicate a problem for congested ISPs, content creators, and legit P2P delivery outfits: piracy. When Comcast joined the DCIA, Comcast CTO Tony Werner's language was telling:

"By having this framework in place, we will help P2P companies, ISPs and content owners find common ground to support consumers who want to use P2P applications to deliver legal content." -Comcast CTO Tony Werner

In short, Comcast customers who want to use P2P to trade copyrighted files are about to either become second class citizens, or find themselves booted from the Comcast network entirely (I'll get to that in a second).

Comcast's P2P lovesicle also goes hand in hand with a massive new billing shift. While Comcast preaches their love of P2P, the company continues to throttle upstream P2P traffic and will until the end of the year. At that point, the company is currently considering implementing a 250GB usage cap, while penalizing customers for over-use.

Comcast lawyers recently realized that instead of employing throttling techniques that anger network neutrality advocates, they can cure congestion problems by prioritizing their own P2P traffic (or P2P traffic from preferred, legal vendors), while leaving regular P2P traffic alone, but picking off pirates one at a time. As an internal source recently told me, Comcast wants to begin terminating the accounts of users who receive four DMCA warning letters per year.

Comcast solves their congestion problems, gains added revenue from charging over-use fees (and P4P use?), prevents piracy from competing with their own content, gets the FCC off their back, and gets to tell anyone who doesn't like it that they're simply fighting for justice. It's really a fairly ingenious way to solve what's been a disastrous PR problem, but it does raise a number of questions I know won't be asked by the tech media until it's too late:

•Will ISPs charge customers to use P4P?

•Do participating ISPs plan to throttle "illegal" P2P traffic, or block access to certain websites (Pirate Bay comes to mind)?

•What exactly determines what kind of content gets the honor of being transmitted over the P4P network?

•What do non-coalition P2P video delivery members have to do in order to play with the major ISPs? Are we making ISPs P2P content gatekeepers and making speedy P2P delivery "pay to play"?

•Do ISPs intend on forcing users who want to use P2P to use their P4P network? Can I get that in writing?

•Will the ISPs' new P4P project track what content is being shared and penalize users for sharing that copyrighted Air Supply album?

•Does part of the design involve making tracking easier for the MPAA & RIAA?

•Care to publish the client source code?

I hope to talk with ISPs, P2P companies and Pando Networks over the next few months in order to get a more complete picture of what's clearly a major shift in the industry. I'd keep a close eye on this: the P4P plan is about much more than just building a better mousetrap.