Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner all agreed to prohibit the online dissemination of child pornography in a deal that they struck with N.Y. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. The deal would block access to newsgroups on Usenet, the pre-Internet discussion community.
But what seemed at first like a targeted attack on child porn has turned into the beginning of the end for Usenet because of the radically different approaches the ISPs are using to block access to it.
Verizon has pledged to block access to a significant portion of newsgroups, while Time Warner plans to drop access to it entirely.
But will this pact also mark the end of net neutrality? A New York Times story said that "the providers will also cut off access to websites that traffic in child pornography."
Time Warner responded immediately.
"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 websites. We're not going to do that."
But not everyone's convinced.
Professional webmaster Joe Hochstuhl of NDTS Consulting has been on Usenet since before the days of the Internet. He told XBIZ that Usenet's utility sprang from its communal, democratic and voluntary nature. He described Usenet as a "a vast voluntary worldwide network of private, personal computers and dial-up lines."
Since then, Usenet sired the modern Internet, which has propagated along phone and fiber optic lines, and naturally, large companies like Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner control access to those utilitites.
"When we eliminate the capability to communicate worldwide via voluuntary means, it gives more potential control to 'the man,' or whatever boogeyman you subscribe to."
The big three ISPs are apparently aware of these concerns, and along with Time Warner's denial of blocking websites, representatives for Sprint downplayed the importance of blocking access to Usenet.
“It's almost a 30-year-old technology,” a person familiar with the Cuomo settlement told CommsDay. “We looked at how many of our customers actually used the service and it is a very, very, very small number of commercial customers. We looked at the challenges we would face to block access to those 88 newsgroups and nothing else and decided it would be more practical to cut access [to the 18,408 newsgroups] altogether.”
Hochstuhl went even further than that. He called Usenet a "pipeline for illegal smut," but he took great care to add that it didn't used to be.
"It depends if people can put Usenet's original existence into perspective," he said. "Which I kind of doubt because modern users do not know what Usenet was or how it came to be."
But before anyone sounds the alarm in the adult industry, rest easy, because the American Civil Liberties Union has already hinted that it might file a suit against the pact.
“The Internet service providers should not be blocking whole sections of the Interent - all Usenet groups - because there may be some illegal material buried somewhere," ACLU technology director Barry Steinhardt said. "That's taking a sledgehammer to an ant.”
ISPs AT&T and Comcast are not participating in the pact.