Earlier this month, several major ISPs, Road Runner, Sprint and Verizon, agreed to work with the New York Attorney General's office and discontinue their newsgroup service in the name of child safety. Out of the thousands of legal and legitimate newsgroups available, the Attorney General's office found 88 such groups that featured the exploitation of children. With one broad stroke, Time Warner, which operates Road Runner, announced they will discontinue their support for the newsgroups starting today.

The decision has been met with tepid reaction. Some viewed it as a positive step forward in protecting children. Others saw it as punishing an entire population based on the actions of a few. Considering how the newsgroups work, the latter may have a more legitimate argument.

In essence, there are two tiers of newsgroup users; those who use the ISP for access, and those who use dedicated providers such as GigaNews or UsenetServer. The former typically use their ISPs server because it's free and is more focused toward discussion. The latter is dedicated for heavy users who demand greater retention and the dissemination of larger files.

Today, thousands of users have been cut off from this discussion-rich environment. Because of the limited retention time, the binaries were never considered a viable source of information on ISP servers. The binaries are a special portion of the newsgroups that permit file-sharing (i.e., alt.binaries.divx, alt.binaries.mp3, etc.). ISP servers are often considered to be a non-viable source for such information.

From Road Runner's website, "I cannot access Road Runner Newsgroups or download articles? As of June 23, 2008, Road Runner will no longer offer Newsgroups, however users can subscribe on their own to third party News providers."

Although today's events are a considerable blow for the newsgroups, third party providers such as Giganews is taking advantage of the potential refugee situation. In an effort to entice Road Runner customers, Giganews
is launching a promotional program which offers steep discounts. The program offers a 50% discount for its most expensive service, and a 20% discount for all other services for the first month.

Edit: NewsDemon wrote to tell us they are offering discounted services to Verizon, Road Runner and Sprint customers. Refugees from those ISPs can sign up for a 15% lifetime discount.

In the end, the decision to block newsgroup access may have unintended consequences. Giganews' program indicates that third party providers have little interest in playing politics, while opening a radically different newsgroup world to ex-ISP customers. Once they realize the full, unthrottled potential of the newsgroups, the results may prove interesting.

This story is filed in these Slyck News categories
Newsgroups/Usenet :: Indexing Sites

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