Seems like Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Attorney General, has cleaned up New York to such an extent that he can now spend his time convincing ISPs to shut down access to gigantic swaths of the Internet:
Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.
[ . . . ]
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.
Ah. All you have to do is yell “CP!” in a crowded theatre, and any subsequent trampling is okay, it seems. It’s been years and years since I’ve been on Usenet, but it – including many alt.* groups – occupies a special place in my own personal online history. It was a place for advanced debate and discussion when the first HTML standards hadn’t even been settled. Usenet hosted the first forum that ever resulted in me getting on a plane to go meet a group of friends I’d never seen in real life (circa 1994).  While I’ve long since moved on, it still appears to be a busy host to exactly that kind of interaction. But hey, Andrew Cuomo needs an issue to run on, and Verizon wants a bit of credit to trade with the regulators, so lets slash and burn the place.