Digital Home Thoughts: Major US ISP's To 'Block' Usenet

"New York’s Attorney General has just launched a blacklist-based initiative to quell undesirable Internet content. Child pornography is the target, although like all blacklists there will be a large number of blocked innocents and civilian casualties. An undercover investigation by the Attorney General’s office uncovered a major source of online child pornography known as “Newsgroups,” an online service not associated with websites. The Newsgroups act as online public bulletin boards where users can upload and download files. Users access Newsgroups through their Internet Service Providers. According to a report by Declan McCullagh, Sprint will be blocking the entire alt. hierarchy of Usenet, while good old Time Warner Cable has no time for such fussiness and will just stop offering all Usenet access. Verizon, the third participating ISP, has not yet announced its blocking plans."

If this were the late '90s, I'd be up in arms about this - me being Canadian not withstanding - but I haven't used Usenet in years...at least, not a mirrored version of Usenet since my ISP (Shaw) stopped offering a direct feed a while back. I use Microsoft's newsgroups now and then, and definitely prefer NNTP as a method of accessing some other groups I'm involved with, but the "real" Usenet? Not so much. That's the catch with this story you see: the ISPs aren't really blocking Usenet access, some of them are simply not going to offer it directly any more (some are going to block portions of Usenet but keep offering the rest). If the customer wants Usenet, they can purchase service via a third party (such as Giganews). It's been so long since I've been truly active on Usenet I don't have a sense of how this will impact users. Is Usenet just a haven for child porn and content piracy? Or are real people using it to exchange information the way they were in the '90s? Share your thoughts.