Verizon offers details of Usenet deletion: alt.* groups, others gone
Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades.
Eric Rabe, a Verizon spokesman, said only a subset of discussion groups, or newsgroups, would be offered to customers in the future. In Usenet parlance, those newsgroups are called the big 8; they include complex procedures for newsgroup creation and deletion and even boast a formal management committee.
Rabe had told us earlier in the week that some newsgroups would be restricted, but … Read more