Marengo writes:

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:54:01 -0600, Pramesh Rutaji wrote:
Art wrote:
Just received a notice from Verizon that starting June 24th all but
the big "8" (which doesn't include ALT) will be blocked.

For what I read, they are not blocking anything. What they are doing
is not providing a service that they had previously provided.

It's not that simple. They've been pressured by the New York attorney
general into enforcing government censorship. No need to go into
details, google the new stories.

It's true that there's pressure involved, but that doesn't make it
censorship. Their customers can still use Usenet; it just won't be
provided as part of their Internet service package anymore. They can
even use it for free through horrible interfaces like Google Groups.

That's no more censorship than the fact that my library doesn't carry
every book and magazine I want. It's not censorship if they choose to
spend their grant money on Dickens instead of Penthouse. Internet
providers have to choose which services will cater to the most customers
and make the most profit. Running a full-feed Usenet server is
expensive, and with only a tiny percentage of customers accessing it, it
just doesn't make fiscal sense to keep it up as an internal service.

In the olden days of online communications, when the Internet was pretty
much restricted to government installations, online services like AOL,
Compuserve, and GEnie provided *all* services internally: chat rooms,
forums, games, e-mail, everything. As the Internet made it possible to
distribute those services to anyone from anywhere, the online services
were replaced with ISPs, which have continued to cut back on the
internal services they provide. Some don't even run a mail server
anymore; they just supply an Internet connection, and send their
customers off to Gmail or somewhere if they want a mailbox.

It's still kind of skeevy for some politician to push this, but kind of
irrelevant too. It's a little like shutting down the buggy whip
factories after everyone's already bought a car.



--
Aaron -- 285/247/200 -- aaron.baugher.biz