Comcast Controversy Digs Up Net Neutrality



Comcast Controversy Digs Up Net Neutrality

Introduction

Ethics is the science of morals and manners. It is a philosophical discipline that reflects on the aims, values ??of life, and the conditions of a happy life, the notion of "good" or on matters of morals or ethics. Ethical behavior essentially involves responsibility for our actions in the integral behavior against other humans and the environment, extending it to the allowance for a good life for future generations (Crowcroft, 2007). Ethics of a company is expressed through their behavior, their codes, their philosophy, their intentions, goals, values, social responsibility, respect for the environment, its relationship with stakeholders (stakeholders: staff, managers, customers, suppliers), and so on. In this paper we are going to discuss ethical behavior of Comcast and also going to evaluate ethical dilemma that digs up net neutrality.

The debate over Net neutrality in the U.S. is more active than ever. With the judgment in the case Comcast, seems that the debate on the regulation of net neutrality has been interrupted. These are the proposed obligations, but the real issue is that the underlying network management (Mowshowitz, 2007). Telecommunications networks are scarce and, as such, they require management. In an environment of scarcity, someone has to decide how to allocate the limited available capacity. For most of its history, management techniques required for telecommunications networks have been simple. But this is changing, with the explosive growth of data traffic, in particular, the data generated by mobile devices. Suddenly, the network capacity is becoming scarcer than ever, and telecommunications operators begin to analyze how to manage the new situation with the resources at their disposal (Anderson, 2007). In short, the issue of net neutrality is not about the need to manage the network: about who decides how to manage the network.

Comcast is largest cable television company and one of the leading providers of Internet services, ISP-across the United States. It is therefore not surprising that several of its millions of users have begun to complain of what looks like a new case of stopping a fully legitimate download service (Honan, 2008). Comcast is the largest provider of cable television and broadband access in America. In addition, also participates in the broadcasting business as majority shareholder of NBC Universal. In 2007, Comcast was reported to the FCC by two civil society organizations for blocking traffic peer-to-peer and prevent their users from using applications that are supported on these networks (such as BitTorrent and Ares) (Ross, 2010). The company initially denied the allegations and later acknowledged that he was just blocking traffic as a measure to relieve the flow of data in networks in places where the abuse of these applications affect the quality of service. After a series of tests offered by the FCC, Comcast ended up recognizing that such practices were not carried out only in places where there was congestion.

Many issues of network management have been raised due to the controversy of ...