On Sun, 3 Aug 2008 22:06:39 -0700 in Wendy7 wrote:


You're getting your USENET via servers provided by Cox Communications.
Cox, bless their souls, is still largely a broadcasting a newspaper company.
They also have agreements concerning distributing TVs and movies.

The companies that pulled or curtailed USENET claiming
complying with Cuomo are
Time Warner
Verizon
Sprint
Comcast

AT&T has also recently pulled service.

Time Warner and Comcast both have interests in TV and movie studios.
A LOT of the traffic in the binaries newsgroups are
TV shows and movies distributed in violation of the license issued by
the copyright owners.
Time Warner owns a record label. A smaller, but significant chunk
of traffic in the binaries newsgroups is unauthorized distribution
of music (Nevermind RIAA finally admitted that pirated music
is the best advertising they didn't have to pay for).

Verizon and AT&T are currently under some pretty nasty negotiations
to distribute TV and movies. The folks that own the copyrights on
the TV shows and Movies think they can get much better profit it
the create an artificial scarcity of the resource.

Sprint, well, Sprint just has problems.

It is in their interest to stop this traffic.
So, when Cuomo gave them an excuse that's even good for murder
by an angry mob, they jumped on it.

They could have taken the polite approach of only getting rid of
the newsgroups that have unauthorized content. This tactic was
tried by Universities in the 90s to combat porn. This just lead
to porn in non-porn newsgroups and the creation of tools such as
cleanfeed to discard articles containing binaries.


If you want to blame anyone, first start with yourself.
What have you done to discourage the mob mentality that led to
a pediatrician in the UK being assaulted by an illiterate mob
that thought pediatrician meant pedophile?
What have you done to pressure your elected representatives to
require a separation between content providers and content carriers?
What have you done to pressure the DoJ to start antitrust proceedings
against media giants like Time Warner, Fox Broadcasting, and Comcast?

Right now you're seeing the fallout from removing large
components from a network. The fellow that runs
motzarella.org as a hobby currently lacks any peers that
can provide binaries, however those peers are okay with
distributing the binaries from motzarella.org to their peers.
It will improve as time goes by.
Some of it will be dropping the old ways and embracing new
ways that consume fewer resources.
Some of it will be waiting for the network to work out
the snarls.

--
Chris Dukes
"Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like."
-- G. K. Chesterton.