Science Tuesday: Porn Scarier than Censorship

Verizon made a deal with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to police child pornography traffic on its networks. An original survey of Usenet groups found 88 newsgroups that shared child pornography. (Side note, Usenet was the first widespread, civilian internet network and is still popular in some circles today). This established, Verizon has announced that it will ban all Usenet forums except for the "Big Eight" a subset of forums that are more actively moderated and organized.

This is patently ridiculous. I'd be horrified at the precedent that's being set if it weren't so clearly absurd; eliminate porn on the internet by eliminating the internet. The 88 targeted newsgroups are a miniscule subset of the hundreds of thousands that will be eliminated under Verizon's policy. Users will still be able to access Usenet by using other ISPs, who hopefully won't be so foolish as to follow Verizon's example.

So what caused this illogical reaction? The idea that ISPs should (or can) be responsible for all user content on their networks is crazy. Senator Lieberman is fighting YouTube to have all videos with jihadi content removed, regardless of whether they advocate violence, but it is not the place of ISPs to regulate speech on the internet any more than it is Microsoft's problem if I use MS Word to write revolutionary tracts. The ISPs should leave the question of child pornography with law enforcement, perhaps helping to identify questionable content, but it should not be responsible for porns prevalence.

(The Verzion plan suffers from no taint of sanity or irony; one of the newsgroups banned is alt.censorship)