Yesterday Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner agreed to censor the internet at the behest of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. The story that didn’t get told is just how the corporations were going to go about the censorship task. Declan McCullagh, writing for c|net news.com, tells that story. And it’s every bit as troubling as expected.
Time Warner will cut its customers access to the entirety of Usenet. Never mind that there are more than 100,000 Usenet newsgroups and Cuomo’s office found only “88 different newsgroups” containing illegal material.
Sprint will cut access to the alt.* hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups, more than 18,000 individual newsgroups. “Ditching all of those means eliminating perfectly legitimate conversations,” McCullagh writes.
Verizon’s game plan is less specific, but McCullagh reports that the company intends to eliminate some “fairly broad newsgroup areas.”
Instead of cutting access to the fewer than 100 newsgroups found to contain illegal material, the internet service providers chose the ham-handed approach: Censoring entire hierarchies within the Usenet structure, or even Usenet in its entirety. Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty project, compared the service providers’ action to “taking a sledgehammer to an ant.”
McCullagh points out that internet censorship in the US is far from a new concept. Pennsylvania tried five years ago but a federal judge overturned the law shortly thereafter, citing “prior restraint on protected expression and that its ‘extraterritorial effect violates the dormant Commerce Clause’ of the US Constitution.”
The core problem with this arrangement bears repeating: This agreement challenges the long-held idea that internet service providers are immune from liability for third-party content carried on their networks. This idea was codified in the 1996 Communications Decency Act which specifically grants such immunity. In 1997, the US Supreme Court overturned the law, ruling that the internet is uniquely entitled to the highest protections offered by the First Amendment.
