Daniel Radosh is skeptical that the New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s settlement with ISPs Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable is anything other than a publicity-stunt shakedown. The Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography argues that it is actually counterproductive. Orin Kerr notes that it is of questionable constitutionality. Declan McCullagh suggests, as does David Kravetz, that the ISPs will comply by shutting off customers’ access to broad swaths of Usenet well beyond anything alleged to contain illegal material.
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The WaPo article on the Financial Coalition seems to be off-base in using the AG deal as a news peg. What does blocking access to free Usnet groups have to do with tracking financial transactions?
[…] to force internet service providers (ISPs) to cut off access to internet news groups (see links at Ted Frank’s post at Overlawyered). Cuomo has reached a “voluntary” (read: coerced) settlement with ISPs Verizon, […]
Forcing is hardly the keyword here. The big ISPs have been trying for years to get rid of Usenet with their packages. The costs are high, the users are fewer in number and the bandwidth usage per subscriber is very high, and complaints are very high over incomplete files and retention.
More than likely they cut a back room deal, Cuomo comes off looking like he’s tough on pervs and the ISPs get rid of a cash albatross. A win-win for everybody but the consumer.
Forcing is hardly the keyword here.
An article from the NY Times contains this quote:
“After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. “
and….
“As part of the agreements, the three companies will also collectively pay $1.125 million to underwrite efforts by Mr. Cuomo’s office and the center for missing children to purge child pornography from the Internet.”
So let’s see…. the companies are threatened with lawsuits and criminal investigations from Cuomo’s office and in response, they “give” a boatload of money to that same office.
Although there may be a component of the companies wanting to limit Usenet groups, it certainly appears that the threats by Cuomo were a part of the “forcing” done here.
Sorry gitarcarver, but the wheels start falling off your argument when you begin by quoting the NY Times. $1.25 million collectively is chump change for any of these companies much less all three combined. I stand by my comments, these companies are glad to get rid of Usenet, because the cost of maintaining the server farms is high and the subscribers in question are high bandwidth users. A threat is just that until action is taken. Think along the lines of “Make it sound Draconian so we can tell them we had to shut ’em down. Lastly, the amount of porn on the newsgroups is minuscule compared to WWW. This is not to say it isn’t a lot, just not when compared to the web.
These are the same companies that want to start charging by total bandwidth useage and “inspecting” every packet you send and receive so they can push selected advertising to your computer.
Bumper, even if what you say is true, it doesn’t excuse the role of the AG here. TimeWarner might want to get rid of Usenet, but it wouldn’t dare be the first ISP to do so, because it would risk alienating consumers. And it couldn’t cut a deal with the other ISPs for everyone to get rid of Usenet, because that would violate Section 1 of the Sherman Act. But such cartels are perfectly legal when they’re imposed by government action. For a small payment to Cuomo, the AG has given imprimatur to an agreement to shortchange consumers.
This is the sort of thing the Center for Justice & Democracy is approving of.
Sorry gitarcarver, but the wheels start falling off your argument when you begin by quoting the NY Times.
The same information is in articles from Slashdot, CNet, Wired, The Washington Post, etc.
$1.25 million collectively is chump change for any of these companies much less all three combined.
I am not sure of your point here. It is not the money, it is where the money went to.
A threat is just that until action is taken.
Yet a threat carries a certain weight of force behind it which is the point of the whole thing.
While it may be true that the ISP’s wanted to get rid of Usenet groups, it is also true that this action by the AG of New York forced them to either close it down or face legal action.