New York: Internet Censor?

Pull up a chair, kiddies... let me take you back to the early 1990's, when I first heard about this "internet" thing. Being the sort that routinely used local bulletin boards for chat and downloads, the idea of a single dial-in to access computers around the world without paying long-distance fees quickly became a "gotta have it" thing. The Web wasn't much of a much back then, but there were all sorts of other resources available, with names like Archie, Veronica, Gopher and the like... most of which have gone by the wayside with the rise of the Web.

One holdover from that age is a thing called Usenet. Before individual website forums became all the rage, this service acted as a single, HUGE forum that spanned the globe... it was able to do so because it's a decentralized service. Anybody could set up a server and tie in to the network, and join in discussions on tens of thousands of topics, all arranged in a hierarchy that made what you were looking for relatively easy (by the standards of the time, at least).

As long as I've had an Internet connection, access to a Usenet server has been included in the price, up to this very day. Mind you, I'm not so much up on chat these days, and there are much simpler/easier ways of getting files than through uuencoded posts too (damn, now that's showing my age and geekiness), but it's always been there when I decided I wanted to check it out One More Time. While I've been surprised by its continued resilience, I can see why it survived... as a service predating the early '90s, its requirements are laughably low by today's standards, and there's still a certain geek cachet to having a "seekrit" message area, unknown to the unwashed masses that roam the Web today.

New York is trying to start the ball rolling on putting down this relic of a service... they've convinced three of the larger Internet providers to drop their support for the service (here's the news story), because, as with the Internet at large, there are unsavory types that use the service for their own ends too... the purported target in this case being child porn traders. I have no beef with blocking out/shutting down/blowing up the offending parts of the service, but targeting the whole, or large swaths, based on the behavior of a few, is simply wrong. It would be like shutting down Google Image Search because naughty photos occasionally show up, or shutting down Mapquest because it includes streets that prostitution occurs on.

I suppose I shouldn't get too excited... I'm sure that Usenet is a marginal thing for ISPs these days, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if my ISP were to quietly drop support for it for just that reason... especially since it's still available through any number of non-ISP run servers. What really bothers me, though, is a state government trumpeting that they're further restricting your online options (options, presumably, you didn't even know you had), even if you're not in their state, for your own good/the good of the children/etc.