More ISPs Decide to Filter Usenet Newsgroups

by via the EFF

Sat, Jul 19, 2008 4:19PM

Friday, July 18, 2008 :New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo recently succeeding in pressuring AOL and AT&T to join the ranks of Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable in limiting access to many or all of the Usenet newsgroups hosted on their servers. This tactic will hinder free speech and the access to information in Usenet communities, without deterring the child pornographer. But since the ISPs are “voluntarily” bowing to political pressure, rather than obeying a statutory edict, traditional First Amendment court challenges are unlikely to protect these online communities.

Attorney General Cuomo has pressured these companies into censoring enormous amounts of First Amendment-protected material after an investigation found 88 groups containing child pornography, or 0.5% of the active discussion groups in the alt.* hierarchy. Verizon and Sprint are taking down one gigantic subset of groups, the very popular alt.* hierarchy, AT&T will block all alt.binaries.* groups, while Time Warner Cable and AOL are shutting down their Usenet service entirely.

California's Governor and Attorney General have jointly called on California's service providers to follow New York's initiative in "removing child pornography from existing servers and blocking channels that disseminate the illegal material."

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For more information: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/more-...

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