[Infowarrior] - AT&T jettisons the last of its Usenet

[Richard Forno]

AT&T jettisons the last of its Usenet

A bad year for newsgroups

By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Telecoms, 9th June 2009 17:10 GMT

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/att_kills_usenet/

AT&T has dealt another blow to the internet relic known as Usenet.

Sometime next month, the American telcom giant will terminate its  
entire newsgroup service. "Please note that on or around July 15,  
2009, AT&T will no longer be offering access to the Usenet netnews  
service," reads a note sent to AT&T and posted on the company's Usenet  
servers.

Last July, bowing to pressure from grandstanding New York Attorney  
General Andrew Cuomo, AT&T eliminated access to all alt.binary  
newsgroups - i.e. all groups that serve up full-blown data files. As  
he had done with AOL, Time Warner Cable, Sprint, and Verizon, Cuomo  
coaxed AT&T into signing an agreement that cut the cord to 88  
newsgroups where state investigations had turned up nearly 11,000  
"sexually lewd photos featuring prepubescent children."

But like many of its ISP brethren, AT&T chose to extend this  
ostensible porn crackdown beyond those 88 groups. "We’ll no longer  
include alt.binary newsgroups [as part of its broadband package]  
because of the prevalence of child pornography in that particular  
newsgroup hierarchy, and the difficulty in ensuring that no child porn  
reappears in those newsgroups," an AT&T spokesman told us at the time.

Now, AT&T is bagging the entire service - though customers can still  
tap Usenet through third-party offerings. ®