Comcast drops giganews service
At least one customer laments the loss of the Usenet services once offered by ISPs -- and recently canceled
Follow @infoworldEarl wrote to me with a beef about Comcast. "I recently received a newsletter that mentioned Comcast had dropped the Usenet portion of its broadband Internet package," he explains. "I was surprised since I had not received notice from Comcast. Comcast's Usenet service provided 2GB of free downloads through Giganews each month. Wondering what was up, I sent an e-mail to the contact e-mail address. I got a quick reply: Yes, they were dropping the service because few people use it anymore. I'm one of those few people, so I replied, asking when they were thinking about notifying their customers and if there would be a decrease in fees for the reduced service. (Ha!)"
Not surprisingly, Earl never really got an answer to that "reduced fee" question, so I forwarded his message to Comcast to see if further explanation was forthcoming.
No reduction in fee, I'm afraid, but I did get a bit more explanation of what motivated this drop in service and options for Giganews fans. Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesperson, explained that "Comcast discontinued its complimentary Newsgroup service on October 25 and stopped offering the service to new customers in September. We put up a notice on our Web site about this, and Comcast customers who used the service were sent an e-mail to the address on their account. Other ISPs have terminated their newsgroup services as well, in part due to their declining popularity as Internet users turn to blogs, online communities, and Web browsing to access the same kind of information."
According to news reports, there may be a bit more to the reason, though. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been attacking ISPs for providing Usenet services, saying they harbor child pornography. Cuomo sent Comcast a letter threatening legal action because, he claims, Comcast "continues to drag its heels" when it comes to "taking every necessary action to eliminate online child porn from the Internet." Most of the other ISPs, according to Cuomo's letter, fell in line much quicker than Comcast.
So it turns out this may be as much a First Amendment issue as a service one. I'm pretty sure there is a lot more going on at Giganews -- and other Usenet services -- than child porn. So maybe it's the New York Attorney General that Earl should write to?
Charlie suggested that customers who liked the Giganews service can still get it -- directly from Giganews. "You can continue to use any newsgroup service you choose," he says, "by going directly to their Web site and signing up."
