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TechDirt stole my thunder, but I shall opine nevertheless. It's quite sad how little attention this is getting outside the corners of the internet where tech-savvy people gather, but perhaps the media thinks those are the only people who would understand it. The overriding theme, the sound bite, the message, it's loud and clear and it can't be argued against:
Internet Service Provider X shuts down access to deep dark portion of the Internet where only pedophiles hang out. Your children are safer now!
You have carte blanche to do whatever you want in this country if you can somehow, in some vague way - with connections basic enough so Joe-casual-news-reader can understand - tie it into protecting the children. If the appearance of the children being protected looks good enough, it doesn't matter what reality actually is.
Besides, a good portion of people out there probably have no idea what Usenet is.
Follow up:
Usenet, in a short and over-simplified way, is interactivity on the Internet before there was interactivity on the Internet, or even the Internet as we know it. Usenet predates the social networking giants that almost all of us use today, it predates the "user generated content" sites, it predates the message boards which came before all that. Usenet is a decentralized system of computers and servers the world over where people post things - messages, stories, topics (so basically the grandfather of the message board). Collectively the posts are known as news and categories of news are known as newsgroups. A hierarchy is in place to group the groups, which give a general idea of the content in them. sci.* will tend to have things about science. news.* will tend to have actual news stories. talk.* will tend to have random banter. You get the idea.
These discussion groups are not the enemy, however. Usenet is also home to the first and, some thought, the last bastion of the file sharing world, alt.* The alt.* newsgroup is where nearly every last bit of new anything you see on the internet for downloading - music, movies, software, games, you name it - is posted before it goes anywhere else. alt.* is the source for many bittorrent releases. Usenet has been a thorn in Big Content's side for a very long time, and it seemed that Big Content had no effective way of stopping it. Shutting down Usenet would be like shutting down a section of the Internet, and that's just never going to happen in America, right?
Give the ISPs a minor amount of credit, they tried everything else they could to fight file sharing for nearly a decade now. They've targeted specific software (Napster, Kazaa), they've targeted individuals (hey neat, the music sharer is in jail longer than the rapist), they've targeted websites that do no hosting of content but just give links to where that content is (Suprnova, Demonoid, OiNK, but not Google because they have way too much money to fight it), they've targeted people at random (college students and grandmothers are keeping record execs from getting that 7th figure in their check!), they've even targeted the concept of higher education in America (lobbying Congress to cut funding for schools who don't cut down or ban file sharing, forget the kids future or the cost of tuition). None of that has worked. File sharing, led by bittorrent and some rather smart people continuing to work on more and more complex decentralized and encrypted methods of file dissemination, has not been slowed.
There are some minds out there in the groupthink collective of Big Content that would probably enjoy seeing the Internet turned off, or turned into a metered pay-per-month website package deal (the Basic tier, 50 websites & now including Myspace! only 29.99/month!). Neither one of those things are going to happen, which leaves only one possible way to stem the file sharing tide: ban an entire subsection of the Internet.
How are you going to do that, exactly? Legal challenges will sprout up from all corners the second any attempt is made to ban any whole section of the internet outright, right?
Enter the convenient excuse: child pornography.
The whole idea behind this oh-so noble movement amongst the ISPs (pressured by Big Content) is not to blot out an entire subsection of the Internet because it is the source for hacked versions of their overpriced software or allows for free dissemination of their mostly substandard entertainment - that would just seem like Big Content being Big Content. No, this cause is noble, and right, and fair, just, and good to throw in some more happy words. This cause is for saving the children. This cause is for stopping child pornography! The pats on the back their giving their selves for their great crusade must feel nice.
This ought to be utterly transparent that this is not a crusade against any such thing - it's an easy way to throw up a smokescreen for a complex problem, make everyone feel good, and actually get nothing done. This is the point where I tip my hat to TechDirt and their explanation for how effective this is in really fighting child pornography:
Taking a stand against child porn wouldn't be overly aggressively blocking access to internet destinations that may or may not have porn (and there's no review over the list to make sure that they're actually objectionable). Taking a stand against child porn would be hunting down those responsible for the child porn and making sure that they're dealt with appropriately. Blocking access to some websites doesn't solve the problem. Those who still produce and make use of child porn will still get it from other sources -- but it will be more underground, making it more difficult for authorities to track down.
That's fine, though. Much like it's okay to put away people who share files for much longer periods of time than people who actually commit real crimes (but multinational corporations are people, too!) it's fine to ultimately hinder future efforts of tracking down those who engage in the perversities of child pornography and the sources they get it from - just as long as Adobe can see a few less copies of Photoshop cracked, or Microsoft a few less copies of Vista, or insert-popular-musical-group-here from having a few more albums downloaded for free.
These are only immediate effects, though. Such decisions, with ISPs going along with it, will undoubtedly have long term ramifications if left unchecked. Back to TechDirt...
Also, this sets an awful precedent in that the ISPs can point out that it's ok for them to block "objectionable" content where they get to define what's objectionable without any review.
What is objectionable, anyhow? Child pornography, obviously, but what about other things that unsettle people? Perhaps porn in general will become too objectionable for the internet. Maybe certain political views? File sharing, of course.
Recently the very popular text editor, Notepad++ caused the entirety of SourceForge to be banned in China because of its stance on the Olympics being held under the repressive regime of China. Chinese ISPs blocked the entire SourceForge domain because one small section of it contained "objectionable" material. Whether it be the ISPs in America, or Big Content and their fat wallets, but I have to wonder sometimes if someone around here is taking notes on how best to go about censoring the Internet.
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