NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and several big ISPs announced with great fanfare the other day a plan to shut down Internet access to child pornography. But as usual with this kind of thing, it’s essentially a publicity stunt that plays on people’s worst fears, and may do more harm than good. No one quite knows how it will work, but as Dan Radosh points out, it effectively means shutting down vast swaths of the Usenet, the online bulletin board service whose newsgroups cover a huge range of topics from the academic to the absurd:
Which newsgroups? The article doesn’t say, lest perverts who aren’t already savvy to them try to sneak in some 11th hour downloading, but it’s worth knowing. Are we talking about groups that traffic exclusively in kidporn, or groups that attract all sorts of privacy freaks, including hackers, duggies, conspiracy theorists, jihadists and whatnot. It’s been a long while since I’ve looked at Usenet, but I seem to recall several catch-all “red-light” districts.
Update: Oh, it’s even better than that. Time Warner is simply going to drop Usenet altogether. Sprint will lose the entire alt.* hierarchy (even alt.barney.die.die.die?!) and Verizon said it may also take that approach. In other words, to block access to 88 groups where the AG found kidporn, the ISPs are ditching between 20,000 and 100,000 groups.
[Officials] acknowledged that they could not eliminate access entirely. Among the potential obstacles: some third-party companies sell paid subscriptions, allowing customers to access newsgroups privately, preventing even their Internet service providers from tracking their activity.
In other words, this agreement is essentially useless, except perhaps to generate revenue for porn middlemen.
So, they’re shutting down millions of online conversations in order to eliminate just 88 newsgroups, most of which (apparently) have minimal amounts of child pornography to begin with. The porn, meanwhile, will continue to be available via other means. This is what happens when politicians eager to hit some hot buttons team up with government agencies that have marginal technical knowledge and with corporations whose principal interests are avoiding public embarrassment and scoring political chits.
That said, I’m curious what an effective anti-child porn policy would look like, or if it is even possible to devise one. Officials admit that going after the downloaders here and there won’t do much good, that they have to target the source. But it’s very hard to track the source of images, and if they are being created overseas, there’s little U.S. law enforcement can do. And given the Internet’s density and diversity and the economic incentives for keeping pornography in circulation, it simply may not be possible to limit access to specific kinds of material without playing whack-a-mole.
