Usenet Censorship

Comcast has joined the list of ISPs who are denying access to Usenet newsgroups in a 'voluntary' agreement to fight child porn online.

Comcast released a statement back in July saying officials planned to sign on after New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo threatened legal action.

Cuomo employed the same hard-nosed legal threats in order to obtain signatures from AOL, AT&T, Verizon and 13 other cable providers, supporting his campaign.

Comcast posted a notice on its website over the weekend informing users that its newsgroup services had been terminated.

Theoretically the agreement requests ISPs take measures to eliminate child porn websites and Usenet newsgroups containing child pornography from their servers. Unfortunately the ISPs seem to be removing a large amount of non-contentious content as well.

AT&T has dealt another blow to the internet service known as Usenet.

Sometime next month, the American telecom giant will terminate its entire newsgroup service. Please note that on or around July 15, 2009, AT&T will no longer be offering access to the Usenet netnews service, reads a note sent to AT&T and posted on the company's Usenet servers.

Last July, bowing to pressure from grandstanding New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, AT&T eliminated access to all alt.binary newsgroups. As he had done with AOL, Time Warner Cable, Sprint, and Verizon, Cuomo coaxed AT&T into signing an agreement that cut the cord to 88 newsgroups where state investigations had turned up child abuse images

But like many of its ISP brethren, AT&T chose to extend this ostensible porn crackdown beyond those 88 groups. First they censored the entire alt.binary newsgroup architecture, Now they are halting the entire service.