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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9964895-38.html?tag=nefd.lede

N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access
Posted by Declan McCullagh 54 comments

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday that Verizon
Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint would "shut down major
sources of online child pornography."

What Cuomo didn't say is that his agreement with broadband providers
means that they will broadly curb customers' access to Usenet--the
venerable pre-Web home of some 100,000 discussion groups, only a handful
of which contain illegal material.

Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any
Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide.
Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of
alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly
broad newsgroup areas."

It's not quite the death of Usenet (which has been predicted,
incorrectly, countless times). But if a politician can pressure three of
the largest Internet providers into censorial acquiescence, it may only
be a matter of time before smaller ones like Supernews, Giganews, and
Usenet.com feel the squeeze.

Cuomo's office said it had "reviewed millions of pictures over several
months" and found only "88 different newsgroups" containing child
pornography.

"We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service
providers to ensure they do not play host to this immoral business,"
Cuomo said in a statement released after a press conference in New York.
"I call on all Internet service providers to follow their example and
help deter the spread of online child porn."

That amounts to an odd claim: stopping the spread of child porn on a
total of 88 newsgroups necessarily means coercing broadband providers to
pull the plug on thousands of innocuous ones. Usenet's sprawling set of
hierarchically arranged discussion areas include ones that go by names
like sci.math, rec.motorcycles, and comp.os.linux.admin. It has been
partially succeeded by mailing lists, message boards, and blogs; AOL
stopped carrying Usenet in 2005, but AT&T still does.

Many of Usenet's discussion groups are scarcely different from
discussions you might find on the Web at, say, Yahoo Groups. Because
there's no central authority, however--Usenet servers exchange messages
in a cooperative, peer-to-peer manner--politicians are more likely to
look askance at the concept. (For that matter, so is the Recording
Industry Association of America.)

It's true that of the three broadband providers Cuomo singled out, only
Time Warner Cable will cease to offer Usenet. Sprint is cutting off the
alt.* hierarchy, Usenet's largest, which will primarily affect its
business customers. A Verizon spokesman said he didn't know details,
saying "newsgroups that deal with scientific endeavors" will stick
around but admitted that all of the alt.* hierarchy could be toast.

Yet Usenet's sprawling alt.* hierarchy contains tens of thousands of
discussion groups--one count says there are 18,408 of them--including
alt.adoption, alt.atheism, alt.gothic, and alt.tv.simpsons. Ditching all
of those means eliminating perfectly legitimate conversations.

"The Internet service providers should not be blocking whole sections of
the Internet, all Usenet groups, because there may be some illegal
material buried somewhere," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the
ACLU's technology and liberty program. "That's taking a sledgehammer to
an ant."

For their part, the three broadband providers that Cuomo singled out on
Tuesday said that it makes sense for them to curb Usenet.

"We're going to stop offering our subscribers newsgroups," said Alex
Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "Some of the early press on
this indicated we were going to block certain Web sites. We're not going
to do that."

That was a reference to a New York Times article with the headline: "Net
Providers to Block Sites With Child Sex." It said "the providers will
also cut off access to Web sites that traffic in child pornography."

That is common practice in some countries. The French government and
broadband providers have reportedly inked a deal to block Web sites with
child porn, terrorist, and hate speech, for instance.

What Time Warner Cable will do, Dudley said, is remove illegal content
on its network when alerted by the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children. (This is already required by law, has been standard
business practice for many years, and is not a change in policy.)

Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said much the same thing: "We're not
blocking any access to Web sites."

In the United States, the idea of blocking Web sites is not new. The
state of Pennsylvania came up with that idea five years ago, and
Internet providers took issue with it through a lawsuit filed by the
American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and
Technology.

The Pennsylvania statute said "an Internet service provider shall remove
or disable access to child pornography...accessible through its
service"
within five business days after the attorney general notified them of
its existence.

A federal judge in Philadelphia overturned that law on First Amendment
grounds, ruling that it constituted a "prior restraint on protected
expression" and that its "extraterritorial effect violates the dormant
Commerce Clause" of the U.S. Constitution.

New York's attorney general surely knows about that precedent. That is
probably why he settled for strong-arming broadband providers into
curbing Usenet--perhaps with the threat of a press conference that would
all but accuse the providers of trafficking in child porn--instead of
the far more difficult process of defending a law requiring them to curb
Usenet.