USENET Not Dead Yet…But NY AG Is Trying

Last week brought word that New York’s Attorney General finally discovered the tarnished, spam-ridden remnants of USENET, which many of us killed many an hour on, back before the web and the start of perpetual September.

And, well, a good fifteen-twenty years after the fact, an AG noticed just how seedy USENET’s darker corners could be, and pressured several large service providers to block access to.

Over the weekend, CNet carried a story on how Verizon is complying with the AG’s belated realization:

Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said only a subset of discussion groups, or newsgroups, would be offered to customers in the future. In Usenet parlance, those newsgroups are called the big 8; they include complex procedures for newsgroup creation and deletion and even boast a formal management committee. [...]

What this means in practice is that, thanks to the New York state attorney general, Verizon customers will lose out on innocent discussions. Verizon is retaining only eight newsgroup hierarchies, even though over 1,000 hierarchies exist. [...]

The only Usenet newsgroups that Verizon will continue to offer customers are the comp.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.* hierarchies. Customers will continue to be able to connect to other non-Verizon Usenet servers; no blocking is taking place.

Now, even back in the golden age of Usenet, there were service providers — certain universities, really — that blocked access to the alt.* zoo, because of the nature of some of the content there…and because blocking an unrestricted hierarchy by policy played far better with the ‘net that targeting specific newsgroups.

Back in those days, censorship was a dirty word.

My how times have changed.

For whatever it’s worth, the Freie Universität Berlin provides access to essentially all non-binary newsgroups for €10/year.  Or, Google Groups is free, if you don’t mind being limited to a web interface and the lack of a kill file.