Comcast didn’t win over many people when it recently threatened legal action against Comcastroturf.com, a website created by net neutrality advocates to call attention to the trove of fake anti-neutrality comments filed with the FCC. After some reflection, Comcast has decided it won’t sue to take the website down.
Fight for the Future set up Comcastroturf to let people check the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) for their names, so folks can find out if comments they didn’t agree with had been submitted under their names.
But Comcast didn’t like its name being used and sent the group a legal threat from a “cyber threat analyst” working for a third-party vendor that claimed the URL infringed on the company’s intellectual property rights.
The company now says was confused at first about the purpose of Comcastroturf, but that it was mistaken, reports Philly.com. An executive with the company says that after reviewing the site, Comcast does not plan any “additional action at this time.”
Comcast Senior VP Sena Fitzmaurice explains that, “like most major brand owners, Comcast protects our company and brand names from being used improperly on the internet by third parties. We use an established outside vendor to monitor for websites that use our name and brands without authorization, and the vendor routinely sends out notices to those sites. That is what happened here.”
Fitzmaurice also repeats Comcast’s claim that it loves the idea of net neutrality and won’t “block websites or content,” even though it refuses to commit to putting that pledge into its user agreement.
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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