More Web Censorship....going, going, gone

They're at it again.
On Thursday Verizon Communications said it will stop offering its customers access to a whole slew of Usenet discussion areas. I'm one of those customers. When I signed up Usenet, all of it, was part of the package. Now Verizon has taken away thousands of groups just because New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, claimed that that's where all the child porn was. First question is, obviously, how did he know unless he's been there, and even viewing child porn is an offense, so one might ask why isn't Mr. Cuomo doing 90 and 9 in the crossbar hotel?

And, one might ask, what is Verizon going to do for me? Since I'm now paying for something I'm not getting I wonder if there might just be a little reduction in my bill. If you believe that might happen I have a bridge right her that I'd be glad to sell you.

But all of that is fluff.
The real issue is the ham handed way Verizon did the eliminating and the fact they caved in to the ravings of a New York politician at all.

What Verizon did was block all newsgroups with the prefix of "alt." which stands for alternative. There are thousands of them and by his own admission Cuomo said 88 of them sheltered kiddie porn. So let's argue that such trash is just that, trash, and that no one should ever look at it, be tempted to look at it or even know it's around. Fair enough. But let's look further at the newsgroups Verizon blocked: alt.british.drama is one. That basically knocks out all the Shakespeare buffs. Same with alt.french.drama. So much for Voltaire. Perhaps hardest to take is the censorship of alt.binaries.rock-n-roll.

From the outset of the Internet the people who were in it from the start knew as Gospel that All Information Wants to be Free. That includes bad information as well as the good. It is, by the way, also the creed of the good librarian.

It's a slippery slope folks.
Usenet is a part of the Internet that's been there from the beginning, but it's little known and doesn't have a large and vocal constituency. That's why Cuomo and his ilk will probably get away with this act of censorship. Too bad there isn't a stiff penalty for committing an act of censorship, but that's a whole other blog.

How much do you want to bet that one day when we wake up and find our internet choices to be limited to about those of, say, China we'll find that it happened because politicians and their corporate handmaidens like Verizon just chipped and nibbled away bit by bit until all that was left was what they found to be acceptable.

Somehow or other this strikes me as despicable. If I were French I'd be crying, "to the barricades" which is a nice way of letting the establishment know the people aren't happy, what with their burning torches and glistening pitchforks outside the palace gates.

Arjay