Verizon Cutting Access To Entire Alt.* Usenet Hierarchy

modemac writes "Verizon has declared it will no longer offer access to the entire alt.* hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups to its customers. This stems from last week's agreement for major ISPs to cut off access to 'newsgroups and Web sites' that make child pornography available. The story notes, 'No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups — out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.' In response, Verizon will cut its customers off from a large portion of Usenet, as it will only carry newsgroups in the Big 8."

Comments

Re:alt.binaries.*

[TeamSPAM]

But does it really save them bandwidth costs by getting rid of those groups? All the traffic to the usenet server should be internal to Verizon's network. Internal bandwidth should be very low cost for Verizon while external bandwidth would have a much higher cost. Cut this usenet access and how many people will switch over to using BitTorrent to download stuff. Which will most likely have to go outsides Verizon's network for all or a portion of the torrent. Will this increase in external traffic cost Verizon more than running a complete usenet server?