Is this the beginning of the end for Usenet as we know it? Wouldn’t surprise me.
It broke last week that New York’s attorney general had targeted Usenet because of the existence of child pornography. Fair enough, no one wants that. But the reaction by several ISPs could set a dangerous precedent, and could threaten the way Usenet works.
Time Warner, my ISP (for the time being), will no longer carry Usenet at all once the end of the month rolls around. Not just binary groups, the only place where the offending content could be posted (other than plain text links, I suppose), but all of Usenet. That’s a shame, as I learned a good deal from the comp.sys* groups back in the day. No more free movies and so on, either. You’ll still be able to access Usenet through a third-party server like Giganews, but Time Warner will no longer provide access. I wonder if it’ll lower my bill, then?
Verizon will no longer carry the alt.* groups; you’ll only find the Big 8.
Sprint has similarly agreed to curb Usenet access.
Obviously it’s the ISPs’ right to choose what groups it carries and what groups it doesn’t, but this does reek of overreaction.
And to play devil’s advocate, the argument, “Well, then why doesn’t Verizon just block access to the Web, there’s gotta be gross content on that?” Difference is, those files aren’t on Verizon servers, whereas they were on its Usenet servers (allegedly).
Given my advocacy for Usenet this past year, you’d think I’d be more upset than I am. I mean, all I’m losing is access to a few binary groups, groups that can easily be replaced with BitTorrent sites. And I’ll be in another country in about a month’s time, so I have bigger things to worry about.
And as far as the larger speech issue goes, it’s not like these ISPs are preventing you from accessing the service, but rather they’re just no longer providing it. I don’t quite know if that counts as censorship, especially given Google Groups’ existence (anyone remember Deja?).
It sucks, yes, but I think we, as a society, have more important issues to concern ourselves with than whether or not Verizon, as a company, offers access to alt.tv.simpsons.
A nice discussion about this can be found on the comp.sys.mac.system group. I’m sure they’re others, but it’s one that caught my eye as far as groups I regularly visit go.
Why worry about ISPs dropping USENET when sites like http://www.jlaforums.com offer a convenient web based access to text and binary groups - all free?
.. you know.. most of australia is binary-free these days.. so.. welcome to the club, america. Sure we have a limited usenet feed, text mainly, but our government mandated that content such as usenet that was stored in whole or part, on the respective isp’s gear that was located within the aussie boundries was subject to the same rules and regulations as every other form of ‘banned’ or ‘probhibited’ content.
.. what I dont get it this…
some big-wig did a reccy on usenet and found 88 newsgroups with banned content. these news groups probably had legitimate content posted to them; no matter, we’ll take them from the legitimate people using them because a few bad apples have posted banned content.. the bad apples have already moved to other newsgroups, and thus, it stands to reason, that more newsgroups will be banned.. where does it end? …and what happens when the bad apples move on, the original newsgroups start having legit content posted to them, but they’re still blocked… so lets ban usenet, completely, so the bad apples move to (say) bit torrent.. and then they ban all bit torrent.. there is no end to it.. is there…
One of the problems is that the ISP’s are too lazy to implement any sort of monitoring or filtering of USENET content. Sites like those mentioned in the comment above are able to do this just as Youtube and MySpace do - so why not the ISP’s with USENET content. True, you will never get everything - certainly YouTube, MySpace and other are unable to get a 100% result but that is alot better than just simply bannning it all together. Just as the comment above said “Where does it end?”
You can stop whining now… this is the 20th centaury, we have a thing called, “the Pirate Bay”. I’m confident it can replace usenet with ease.
People who say Bit Torrent will easily replace alt.binaries… don’t understand the dynamics of how usenet and P2P work. With torrents and other P2P schemes like Napster, everyone reveals their IP. With usenet, only the uploader reveals himself. Further, the reason why ISP agreed so readily (without going to court as they do for many other simpler things) is that it relieves them of a huge financial burden (usenet server farms and band width costs). What next? If someone sends you a porn picture into your mailbox, is the AG and the ISP now going to get rid of e-mail servers too, and then drape the flag of combating child porn onto that too? Bottom line, the real headline should be:
“AG get free publicity as “crime fighter” while he knowingly lets three big ISP rip off their usenet customers in nation wide anti child porn scam.”
Rlaph
I agree that it is the right of the ISP to decide what services it will offer, but to dismiss such an event as not important strikes deep fear into me. This is a fundemental first amendment right issue. In this case, one law enforcement officer has effectively silenced thousands- perhaps tens of thousands or more people from this means of expression.
What if a single person at a sporting event of 65000 people was in possession of child pornography and attempting to give it away at the stadium. If we draw a comparrison… What has happened here is one officer not only decided to arrest the offender, he bullied the stadium into closing its doors to everyone. Yeah, they have the option to go to another stadium, in another city probably, so they can still enjoy a game, but not at that one and pretty soon not at any as each is closed in turn.