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"Comcast does not block any Web site, application, or protocol, including p-to-p. Period," he said.

The company only "manages" protocols such as p-to-p during limited periods of heavy traffic; does so in limited geographic areas; only manages uploads, not downloads; and merely delays, not totally blocks requests for uploads, he said.

"It's true that to maximize our customer's Internet experience, we do manage our network. But don't let the rhetoric scare you. There's nothing wrong with it," he said. "Every network must be managed. Our customers want us to manage network congestion, so they can do what they want, when they want, at reasonable speeds."

Tom Tauke, executive vice president for public affairs policy and communications at Verizon, noted that his company's investment in fiber-optic networks has resulted in exponential growth in the size of data pipes to residential homes, but network management is still necessary. "As capacity grows, so do the applications and services. This is a good thing, but you still have to have reasonable network practices," he said.

Later Monday, the hearing continued with a second panel, this one stocked with an array of technologists from the academic and commercial sectors.

"Some kind of network management is critical. ... the question is how to do that in an open manner," said Daniel Weitzner, director of the MIT's Decentralized Information Group.

At the same time, the Web's days as a primarily client-server environment are over, he suggested: "The profile of the way people use the Internet today is peer-to-peer, and we have to deal with it. But I think it poses a challenge way beyond whether we all get our BitTorrent or not. What's really at stake is everyone's ability to speak with everyone else."

David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT, predicted the debate could ultimately be settled by moving away from current pricing plans -- which see ISPs charge varying rates for a broadband line's speed, but not for the amount of content downloaded -- to a cost schedule based more on data volume.

Eric Klinker, CTO of BitTorrent, said it is wrong for the industry to view his company as a force "endlessly consuming bandwidth."

In fact, he argued, BitTorrent has actually solved a problem: "How do we effectively move large files on the Internet?" He listed off a series of public and private-sector organizations, ranging from film studios to NASA, that employ p-to-p file sharing to deliver large files.

Efforts to thwart p-to-p traffic "would stamp out in its infancy the most promising technology we have to deliver a world of near-infinite content," he said, adding that the United States falls far behind other nations in terms of its Internet infrastructure: "Geopolitically, we might think of ourselves as a superpower, but when measured against network power we're a third-world country at best."

This article was updated on Feb. 25, 2008.