Usenet may be going the way of Gopher, as Time Warner, Sprint, and Verizon, rather than taking measures to selectively target the 88 newsgroups listed by the office of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that contained child pornography, they’ve decided that USENET as a whole is pretty much not worth the trouble.  Time Warner will remove it’s free-to-subscribers USENET servers, Sprint is cutting off the alt.* hierarchy, and Verizon has made no definite plans but it’s likely they they would cut off the alt.* hierarchy as well.

This means, in order to get rid of “alt.illegalstuff.ick.ick.ick,” they will also be shutting down groups like alt.certification.cisco.

Keep in mind that none of these companies are blocking access, as has been erroneously reported on social news services like Reddit.  There’s nothing stopping the NNTP protocol – it’s just that these cable companies will no longer be maintaining their own newsgroup servers.  That means you’ll still be able to get to alt.certification.cisco from Google Groups for free – but Google Groups does not contain all of the alt.* hierarchy, nor does it handle binary attachments.  For that, customers will need to sign up an account with a third-party USENET provider for a fee.

Even so, removing the entirety of USENET seemed like overkill if the issue was a handful of groups, and there are certainly free speech implications.  So we talked to Jeff Simmermon, Time Warner Cable’s director of digital communication.  Simmermon said that the decision to eliminate newsgroups from their service offerings came down to three factors: “a. Very few customers use them; b. the technology is outdated; c. the risk is not worth the reward.”

There’s no doubt that A is true; USENET is certainly a “power user” tool.  Outdated technology? Possibly – although people have been decrying the end of USENET for years, ever since the invention of PHP forum boards.  The third: Risk is not worth the reward… this is actually quite interesting.

USENET is one of the older services – old enough that USENET has actually been tested in the court as a common carrier – that is, so long as an ISP does not edit the content of USENET, they cannot be held responsible for the content of USENET. So I would imagine that the risk would be very, very low – which gives you some idea of what Time Warner thinks of the possible rewards. 

Mr. Simmermon said that customers would not be credited for the removal of what had previously been a free part of their Internet service, “to the best of [his] knowledge.”

Time Warner subscribers will be notified of the change, in a final bit of irony, through postings at the help.rr.com newsgroup.