You can safely assume that is exactly what you are being told in this fairly curious Wired magazine piece on Comcast CEO Brian Roberts (pictured) that just hit the streets. It was all just a big misunderstanding, you see. Well, yes, Comcast definitely throttled P2P traffic, you see, and then lied about why, and then got slammed by the FCC really quite harshly, but… that’s not like, who they are. Or at least, this is the pitch Roberts is making here, with the crescendo of it all being Roberts openly announcing that Comcast 3.0 will be more transparent. We wanna believe him, because we are stuck with Comcast and it’s just too much energy to be thinking about how much they suck all the time. How amazing would it be if Philly’s greatest tech and media export was actually good?

Time will tell whether it’s bullshit or not, but in the meantime, the piece does another curious thing: It totally throws former brain of Mayor Ed Rendell/current Comcast consigliere David L. Cohen under the bus for the P2P thing.

And then, there’s this:

“If I do business with Comcast and then with a Comcast competitor, I don’t wake up with a horse’s head in my bed,” [Real Networks CEO Rob] Glaser says. “Even though Brian is in a position of a lot of power, there has never been a time when he approached that in a venal or reckless way.”

This is after the gushing quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. (Read: NOT EVIL.) Man. I don’t know what to think. Is Brian Roberts what Brian Tierney would be if you just pulled off the ego and that whole Pentagram of Doom thing and replaced it with shit that actually worked? Don’t answer that. Yet.
Wired: I May Or May Not Be A Soul Whose Intentions May Or May Not Be Misunderstood

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 10:50 am.