The trouble with Usenet -- and the ISPs

Hello, grandchildren. You want me to tell you a story? I'll tell you about the old, old days when Bill Gates was jes' a stripling, and the Web was merely a sparkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eyes. Gather round, and mind my lumbago -- tonight, I'll tell you about Usenet.

Actually, David DeJean tells us about Usenet in his article Usenet: Not dead yet? As someone who spent a lot of time in various newsgroups in late 1980s and early 1990s, it reminds me about how important it was to me --and to many computer users.

In those days, Usenet was the place to get information and take part in discussions on a huge variety of topics, such as: which Trek series was the best, whether it was preferable to have manned or robotic space missions, and what to do about that problem that you were having with your latest OS install. (At least, these were some of the things I discussed.)

Web-based discussion groups, blogs, and social networks pulled me away from Usenet long ago, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for these no-moderators, no-restrictions, no-holds-barred newsgroups. And I'm not the only one; there are still folks who do their talking on Usenet (many via Google Groups). However, it seems that there are a also lot of people who do their file exchanging -- applications (freeware and not), music, video, what-have-you -- via the alt.binary.* groups. And this is where many ISPs are now drawing the line.

As David relates, most of the major ISPs -- Time Warner Cable, Comcast, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon -- have either blocked out the alt.binaries.* or the entire alt.* hierarchies, or have stopped offering Usenet access altogether. Their excuse is that they are responding to New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's crusade against child pornography on the Internet.

But let's face it -- if the major ISPs were all that concerned about child porn proliferating on the Net via Usenet, they could have done a surgical strike on those specific newsgroups -- or the hierarchies containing those newsgroups -- a long time ago. Instead, they are suddenly lopping off whole limbs. Why? Probably because Usenet is now affecting them where it counts -- the pocketbook -- in two ways: Putting pressure on their bandwidth, and offering access to exchanges of (admittedly illegal) files that the companies (and/or their partners) want to make available themselves, via cable or other means.

Now, I'm not saying that either of these are bad reasons -- bandwidth is valuable, and I'm not going to defend blatant copyright violation. But it would have been nice if the ISPs were honest with us, and let us know the real reason why so many of their users will now no longer be able to access what, to some, could still be a valuable resource.