Ethical Issues of IT

What are key ethical issues this industry faces?

Information Technology (IT) faces many ethical issues such as producing monopolies, privacy, price fixing, and many more. However, here I will mainly focus on the production of monopolies in IT’s industry players.

Monopolies have been a major issue in the business world for centuries. A monopoly is when a company is in complete control of the market for their product. It has become illegal and unethical for a company to produce and control a monopoly. However, in IT the prospect of a monopoly is much more prominent to occur. For instance, Google possesses searching tools, Facebook possesses social networking and AT&T controlled the telephone industry.

Within the last decade Google has taken over Web searching and has expanded to other markets. The recent European Union antitrust investigation of Google has proven that it has become a dangerously increasing monopoly. For the longest period of time AT&T nearly dominated the telephone and supporting industries. The company brought many services which includes: landlines, mobile phones, internet accessibility, and cable; doing so nearly wiped-out all competitors for that industry.

What are some examples of ethics challenges that industry players have experienced?

Many industry players have had challenges with each other because of patent infringement. Most major industry players have faced many lawsuits dealing with patent infringement. For instance, Microsoft has been sued by other major players and smaller companies and vice versa. Last summer consisted of an immense lawsuit between Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and many other large technology companies. Microsoft alleged that those companies infringed four Web technology patents.

Lawsuits for patent infringements are not the only ethical challenges that these industry players have experienced. For example, Microsoft was sued for “extensive anticompetitive conduct” by Sun Microsystems Inc. Also, Microsoft was sued for dominance in the Web browser market by AOL Time Warner. Microsoft has not been the only company to face lawsuits of such a degree, When you are a major player you are fighting for a position in the market and consumer’s pocket; which causes companies to commit unethical acts that leads to a plethora of lawsuits and other challenges.