Federal regulators on Monday said they are ready to discipline Net service providers who secretly favor assured types of input traffic, like Web surfing, by others, like file sharing.

At a hearing by allegations of traffic discrimination by Comcast Corp., the Federal Communications Commission chairman said the complaints underscore the need to enforce the FCC’s current broad principles intended to promote so-called “Net neutrality.”

“The commission is ready, willing and able to step in whether essential to unmistaken any practices that are ongoing today,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said in opening statements of the hearing at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for World Wide Web and Society.

Martin said service providers should be allowed to take fair steps to assemble efficient use of their networks at a moment when consumers’ growing appetite for Web video threatens to bump up against networks’ capacity limits. But he said such management policies must be disclosed.

“Consumers need to know whether and how

network management practices distinguish amidst different applications, so they can configure their own applications and systems properly,” Martin said.

Consumer groups and a provider of online video have filed complaints alleging Comcast hampered traffic amidst users without notice, violating the Internet’s tradition of equal treatment of traffic. Two of the groups additionally asked the FCC to fine Comcast.

The issue got broad attention after an Associated Press story in October documented Comcast’s practices. Comcast later acknowledged that it sometimes delays file-sharing traffic for subscribers as a way to keep Web traffic flowing for everyone.

File sharing applications, exemplified by BitTorrent and the original Napster, have been a tool for piracy of copyrighted composition, but are increasingly used as cheap route for companies to distribute large files, like movies.

Commissioner Michael Copps, a champion of so-called open Net policies, called for “clear rules of the road for those who operate on the…

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