From the New York Times:
Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography.
The move is part of a groundbreaking agreement with the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, that will be formally announced on Tuesday as a significant step by leading companies to curtail access to child pornography.
Then there is this from Mashable: “Cuomo’s Child Porn Deal: The Death of USENET?”
According to statements found in the press releases from the Attorney Generals office, they found child pornography in a total of 88 USENET newsgroups. Declan MacCullagh reports, though, that to combat this they will be blocking the entire alt.* hierarchy on USENET, as well as a number of other USENET groups, effectively amounting to the majority of all USENET traffic.
The Mashable crew spent a great deal of time soliciting comments from Verizon, Time Warner and Sprint (as well as the NY AG office) on the veracity of Declan’s claims, and all that we could elicit from them were basic numbers on the amount of households affected by their decision to block USENET (numbers that varied widely from the numbers in other published press releases, including the ones from the NY attorney general’s release today). No one seemed willing to go on the record to discuss any aspects of the new filtration decision.
…Still, this draconian decision to end one of the founding and still-strong areas of free speech on the Internet is disturbing, with strong network neutrality implications.
Update from Mashable:
Time Warner is blocking all USENET access entirely. Sprint is blocking the entire alt.* hierchy. Verizon, on the other hand, is blocking on a case by case basis known hangouts for purveyors of child pornography, as they “recognize the value of newsgroups to folks other than child pornographers” and warez traffickers.
Read more from Wired
It’s commendable that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wants to curb online child porn. But his accord with Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint — which more ISPs are likely to join — opens up a Pandora’s box of chilling side effects.
Among the most important is a challenge to the long-accepted notion that ISPs are generally immune from liability for content posted by users, under the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Under the Cuomo deal, the ISPs seem to acknowledge a moral role in policing the internet.
Finally:
The filtering regime comes as at least one ISP looks at using similar technology as an anti-piracy tool. AT&T has said it it’s working with the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America on a plan to implement digital fingerprinting techniques to filter pirated content from the internet.
Let’s see. It’s the phone company, the cable company and the government, hmmm. No problem I can see there.
Front page
Totally Shitty.
Targeted Content Delivery shall be the future.
Where ISPs ’guess’ what you like(based on what you buy and view) and give you a tailored browsing experience based on that. And throttling content from competitors who aren’t paying to play.
Yuk.
The ISPs hate USENET anyway
USENET is an expensive pesthole to the ISPs, they’d rather not have anything to do with it if they can.
Nobody runs a news server that doesn’t have to, so a law telling them to get rid of it will make a lot of them happy.
Except for the real difficulty being
that it won’t work. The child porn people will just shift elsewhere. With USENET, sprawling as it is, a half-dozen eager sets of eyes could be hired for not much money to scroll through the alt boards and flag anything suspicious. Let the USENET mods take them down and block the senders. After not long the purveyors would move elsewhere, as they will now anyway, and USENET stays up and intact.
It was NetNanny I believe that got started by hiring college boys at piecework to troll the net for porn sites to add to their filter program. Bunch of dedicated, productive and happy workers, doing well by having fun, and certainly workable for this application.
Unless, of course, your intention is to control the flow of information, and one of the steps along the path of that conquest is to conflate anyone who advocates an open internet with child pornographers and pedophilia. They wouldn’t do that, would they?
I looked on the Electronic
I looked on the Electronic Frontier Foundation site to see if they were getting into this. Something similar has been tried in the past and been struck down by the courts. I have the feeling that this will be challenged in court at some point.
I think the point is being missed that child porn is always a door that is easy to open and probably leads to others being opened.
I received an email from Verizon about changes to the Terms of Service and the Acceptable Use Policy that I felt concern about (emphasis added):
I find it bad enough wondering if the government is monitoring my emails or your posts. I certainly don’t want some employee at Verizon looking at what I am doing or where I am going on the web and making decisions on whether it’s acceptable.
I guarantee you
The people who administer ISPs do not care what you are doing with the internet. They all assume you’re looking at furry porn or whatever and trust me, they’ve already seen it all.
Unless you start breaking their infrastructure, one way or another. Then they will want to run traffic sniffers on your link to see how come everyone in your neighborhood is complaining about performance sucking or how come the router is sending pages to the on-call network engineer every 5 minutes.
That’s why AUPs have those clauses in them.