[Vision2020] Verizon Discontinues Newsgroup Service

[Kenneth Marcy]

This morning I am displeased, though not particularly surprised, to report 
that I have received an e-mail from Verizon stating that they will cease to 
provide access to any Usenet newsgroups, including those they created for 
their own customers, effective at the end of this month, September, 2009.

The two operative paragraphs are copied below:

"The service will be discontinued on September 30, 2009. After this date, 
Verizon's Newsgroup service will no longer be active.
...
This change will not affect your ability to use your Verizon Internet service 
or other commercial newsgroup services, and there will not be any change to 
the price you pay for your Verizon High Speed Internet or Verizon FiOS 
Internet service."

The recent history of this matter includes, 15 months or so ago, New York 
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's efforts to stop child pornography, resulting 
in the technically incompetent, but administratively understandable, solution 
of getting some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block from public access 
all of the newsgroups whose name started with alt.*.

The vast majority of these groups had nothing to do with the offensive 
material, and could have been spared any interruption in their activities by 
most technically competent Internet infrastructure engineers in Verizon's 
(and some other ISPs) employ. But no, the senior management chose to take the 
more heavy-handed approach and blocked way more newsgroups than were 
necessary to solve the problem. Not only were the alt.* groups, blocked but 
all newsgroups that were not part of the so-called Big-8 scheme of newsgroup 
naming were removed from Verizon's service. The effect of this decision was 
to remove thousands of discussion groups from access by Verizon customers, 
without any reduction in price paid to Verizon for its service.

This recent announcement extends the previous decision to a scorched-earth 
policy towards all newsgroups, again with no rate adjustment to customers. 
One could say that this is just a business decision, a cost-cutting move the 
net effect of which is to increase profits. In some Friedmanian sense that's 
true, but without regard to the larger set of people that are affected by the 
corporation's actions in the community for which it provides service.

Destroying the communication interactions of hundreds of thousands, or more, 
people every day just because senior management wants to use a smoke-screen 
of technical incompetence to mask a larger cost cutting move affecting many 
customers is a clumsy and cowardly way of doing business, as embarrassing as 
it is annoying to affected customers and economic onlookers alike.


Ken