Upcoming Changes in Verizon s Newsgroup Service – Verizon PolicyBlog: “Upcoming Changes in Verizon’s Newsgroup Service
Posted by Eric Rabe in Policy on June 13, 2008, 01:23 PM EST

There has been a lot of reporting about our announcement this week with New York’s Attorney General that we will work to more effectively limit customer access to child pornography over the Internet. We have also seen discussion in online forums about what this means.

Here’s what Verizon will do.

In the case of Web pages on Verizon servers, we have clear terms of service that prohibit posting of child pornography and to do so violates those service agreements. We will review a list of Web pages containing child pornography that is provided to us regularly by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and take down pages from that list that are on Verizon servers. We will report the infraction to law enforcement.

Also beginning June 24, 2008, Verizon will no longer provide access to many of the newsgroups that we had previously provided. We will only offer groups in the Big 8 newsgroups hierarchies, which are listed below. Users will not be able to post or download from any other newsgroups. We have notified customers on the Verizon.net Web site of these changes.

We are not blocking access to either newsgroups or Web sites operated by others. Customers who still want to access newsgroups that are not on this list can do so through commercially available newsgroup services.

Here are the Big-8 newsgroup hierarchies that we will provide access to:

comp.*
humanities.*
misc.*
news.*
rec.*
sci.*
soc.*
talk.*

The 0.verizon.* newsgroup hierarchy will also continue to be available.

Verizon Business, which serves the enterprise market, has a somewhat different solution. Verizon Business is eliminating the ability of newsgroups to carry pictures, limiting the size of the articles distributed through its service, and is eliminating all alt.binaries and alt.binaries hierarchies. In short, Verizon Business will allow access to all newsgroups, but only for text messages.

This change will not affect our customers’ ability to use the Internet or other commercial newsgroup services. Verizon has been a strong proponent of free access for all users to the Internet, and we remain so today.