Like Barbed Wire on the Great Plains

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...

So with the awesome powers of the NSA, anyone posting on Usenet- or anywhere else- can be tracked. Since Usenet's always been a public forum, anyone posting child porn has committed a felony, and can legitimately be tracked and arrested. Case closed.

You would think a real law enforcement agency would want to let the idiots expose themselves. So they could be caught. But porn's not really why big telcoms like Verizon hate Usenet.

Big telcoms want to end net neutrality by 2012.

Bell Canada and TELUS (formerly owned by Verizon) employees officially confirm that by 2012 ISP's all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These 'other' sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet...

Now the politicians really like this one. The big reason the Republicans face the boot this year isn't because FOX has been Fair and Balanced. It's because a few dozen heavy hitters outside the main$tream and thousands of smaller sites like this one have been tracking every dirty deed since 2000.

It's a natural alliance. The main$tream media wants to kill the independent media. The politicians want their pie.

If CNN or any handful of telcom friendly sites become the sole source of news on the web, then Big Brother (or Sister) has won.

Haven't we always been at war with Eurasia? And aren't the choco-rations better this week?