Two days before a second public hearing over its controversial "network management" practices, Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, said it was developing a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for file-sharing services.

Critics blasted the idea as an attempt to deflect criticism of Comcast for having blocked and deliberately slowed the delivery of on-demand video services and other peer-to-peer services offered by competitors.

Comcast's move today follows the company's about-face in March, when it said that by the end of 2008 its network-management policy will be "protocol agnostic"—meaning it will not favor one type of traffic over another—and will instead focus on users who consume the most bandwidth.

Federal regulators are looking into complaints by rivals and consumers that Comcast unfairly throttles some types of internet traffic, particularly videos from companies, like Vuze, that compete with Comcast's video-on-demand service.

The Federal Communications Commission scheduled this Thursday's hearing at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, after Comcast was discovered to have paid people off the street to take up space at an earlier hearing at Harvard.

File-sharing company Pando said it was teaming up with Comcast on the Bill of Rights, becoming the second peer-to-peer firm to strike a pact with the cable giant. In March, BitTorrent said it would work with Comcast to devise the best way to manage peer-to-peer traffic.

Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said the company's "rights" document is "another example of how we can work with the industry to solve these issues rather than getting the government involved."

The company's critics dismissed the plan as "ludicrous."

"This so-called agreement is simply another way for Comcast to try to evade punishment for its blocking and degrading of peer-to-peer services for its customers," said Gigi Sohn, president of consumer rights group Public Knowledge. "The fact that Comcast is trying to come up with a Bill of Rights for customers is ludicrous."

"This is the company that not only lied for a year about the workings of its internet service," Sohn added, "but also created such ill will among its cable subscribers that one elderly woman busted up a customer-service office with a hammer because she and her husband were kept waiting for hours in the heat."

Sohn was referring to an incident last year when 75-year-old Mona Shaw, frustrated by what she felt was Comcast's subpar customer service, smashed up a Comcast office in Manassas, Virginia, with a hammer.

Public Knowledge said Comcast did not ask it for any input regarding the Bill of Rights.

When asked by the blog Ars Technica why Public Knowledge—along with other consumer groups including Free Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation—were not consulted about the Bill of Rights, Comcast spokesman Douglas said, "I don't know."

But, he added, the company hasn't ruled anything out.