We can all thank NY Democrat Andrew Cuomo for killing Usenet
From
Nomen Nescio@nobody@dizum.com to
alt.culture.usenet, alt.cypherpunks, alt.free.newsservers, alt.privacy.anon-server on Mon Dec 8 07:45:01 2025
From Newsgroup: alt.culture.usenet
In 2008, Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable and Sprint Nextel
signed an agreement with Attorney General of New York Andrew Cuomo to shut down access to sources of child pornography.[65] Time Warner Cable stopped offering access to Usenet. Verizon reduced its access to the "Big 8" hierarchies. Sprint stopped access to the alt.* hierarchies. AT&T stopped access to the alt.binaries.* hierarchies. Cuomo never specifically named Usenet in his anti-child pornography campaign. David DeJean of PC World
said that some worry that the ISPs used Cuomo's campaign as an excuse to
end portions of Usenet access, as it is costly for the Internet service providers and not in high demand by customers. In 2008 AOL, which no
longer offered Usenet access, and the four providers that responded to the Cuomo campaign were the five largest Internet service providers in the
United States; they had more than 50% of the U.S. ISP market share.[66] On June 8, 2009, AT&T announced that it would no longer provide access to the Usenet service as of July 15, 2009.[67]
AOL announced that it would discontinue its integrated Usenet service in
early 2005, citing the growing popularity of weblogs, chat forums and on-
line conferencing.[68] The AOL community had a tremendous role in
popularizing Usenet some 11 years earlier.[69]
In August 2009, Verizon announced that it would discontinue access to
Usenet on September 30, 2009.[70][71] JANET announced it would discontinue Usenet service, effective July 31, 2010, citing Google Groups as an alternative.[72] Microsoft announced that it would discontinue support for
its public newsgroups (msnews.microsoft.com) from June 1, 2010, offering
web forums as an alternative.[73]
Primary reasons cited for the discontinuance of Usenet service by general
ISPs include the decline in volume of actual readers due to competition
from blogs, along with cost and liability concerns of increasing
proportion of traffic devoted to file-sharing and spam on unused or discontinued groups.[74][75]
Some ISPs did not include pressure from Cuomo's campaign against child pornography as one of their reasons for dropping Usenet feeds as part of
their services.[76] ISPs Cox and Atlantic Communications resisted the 2008 trend but both did eventually drop their respective Usenet feeds in 2010.
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