Byte Me, Verizon
July 2nd, 2008
After vacation and a business trip, I return to my office the other day, fire up my newsreader, try updating one of the dozen or so newsgroups I follow regularly and am repeatedly met with the same error message: “411 No Such Group.”
It seems that Verizon, which previously had offered access to more than 30,000 newsgroups, has reduced that number to precisely 3,737.
The explanation offered on the Verizon Policy Blog is that this move, which went into effect about a week ago, is in reaction to New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo’s war on child porn. C|Net has a pretty good story about it over here .
The question of the day: Does anyone believe that 26,000+ newsgroups were distributing child porn?
Of course not. Verizon is using child porn as an excuse to shut down access to Usenet and reduce their bandwidth overhead costs. I suspect we’ll see an upsell from Verizon soon: “Get access to tens of thousands of newsgroups! Just $29.95 per month!” In other words: yet another step on the road to tiered service offerings.
Okay, fine — but if you’re going to reduce services, Verizon, how about reducing my monthly cost? After all, when I contracted for FiOS, that included access to 30,000+ newsgroups. Now that access is gone, and if I want it back I need to go to a third party like Giganews or Usenet and pay up to about 25 bucks a month.
Think of it this way: I sign a contract for cable TV that costs me $75 a month and includes HBO. Now the cable company says, “nah, we’re not gonna give you HBO anymore, but we’re still gonna charge you $75. If you want HBO, you can go pay someone else extra for it.”
It’s not right.
So I called Verizon to register my displeasure and to try and get some sort of a statement. The first woman I spoke with had no idea what a newsgroup was. The next guy knew about newsgroups, then said Verizon was offering an add-on package in order to be able to access them again. He switched me to a sales person who said no such package was available. I was handed over to tech support who, of course, could do nothing but commisserate.
I spent about an hour talking to seven or eight different people. I was ultimately transferred to someone in the PR department who, I was told, could at least provide me with a statement, since I said I would be blogging about the issue. I was transferred. I got voicemail. I’m still waiting for a call back, but I am not holding my breath. I sent an email to several media relations folks at Verizon; if any of them reply, I’ll post the response here.
Meanwhile, I continue to research third-party Usenet access services. It looks like I’ll have to pay one of them extra to get what I was receiving from Verizon for years via DSL and FiOS.
Byte me, Verizon.
JULY 2 UPDATE #1: I’d like to thank Cliff Lee of Verizon Media Relations for the following response this afternoon (presented here unedited) to the email I sent yesterday, which included most of the above post:
Mr. Peters,
We have decided to eliminate access to many of the newsgroups available over Verizon systems because newsgroups in the alt hierarchy have been identified by the New York Attorney General after eight months of investigation as being particularly hospitable to child pornography. These newsgroups are not moderated and operate without any supervision or control.
Additionally, these newsgroups are used by very few Verizon customers. Still, most if not all of the alt.* newsgroups are available through other newsgroup services, including commercial newsgroups as well as web-based services that do not charge for the service. Our decision to limit our newsgroup service to the Big 8 hierarchies does not prevent customers from using one of these other newsgroup services. I would also note that other providers have simply eliminated newsgroups altogether.
On the other hand, newsgroups in the “Big 8” hierarchies are more often used for legitimate information sharing and are often moderated by a newsgroup organizer. Of course, if we learn of child pornography present on any of these remaining newsgroups, we will act to remove the offending image or, if appropriate, group.
We understand that today’s technology and the inventiveness of those who are interested in and trade child pornography makes putting an absolute stop to it almost impossible. But we remain committed to the fight against child exploitation and pornography.
We have long maintained that we have the right to make changes in our service, and must do so from time to time, and, of course, this is explained in your terms of service agreement. Sometimes that also means adding services without charging extra.
I recognize that this is probably not the answer you are looking for, but I hope it helps you understand why we at Verizon have changed our policy on providing access to all newsgroups.
JULY 2 UPDATE #2: My response to Mr. Lee follows:
Thanks, Cliff … if I may follow up:
(1) Is it Verizon’s position that all 27,000+ of the newsgroups it eliminated are harboring child pornography? If not, then why not simply eliminate the individual groups instead of the full hierarchies?
(2) If “very few” Verizon customers use newsgroups, can you provide an estimate of what the bandwidth use by those few customers happened to be?
(3) What’s Verizon’s position on this issue vis a vis third party Usenet providers? The truth of the matter is that Verizon’s action accomplishes nothing with regard to child porn as it reduces bandwith overhead for Verizon and increases costs to consumers: By paying anywhere from $6.95 to $29.95 per month to a third party such as Giganews, any Verizon customer can access a far wider range of newsgroups than Verizon offered previously — arguably *increasing* access to child pornography, because the number of newsgroups offered by the third party is on the order of tens of thousands more than what was previously offered by Verizon.
Thank you for your time, and I genuinely appreciate your input.
Will Verizon Media Relations follow up the follow-up? If so, I’ll post it here. Stay tuned.