N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday that Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint would “shut down major sources of online child pornography.” — What Cuomo didn't say is that his agreement …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2008 agreement is a milestone in Andrew Cuomo's systematic campaign to govern online platforms through the New York attorney general's office rather than through legislation. It followed his 2007 model agreement with Facebook on child safety, and the same playbook — pressuring intermediaries into voluntary compliance under threat of litigation — reappears in his later suit against Tagged.com and the state's 2012 push to purge sex offenders from online games. The ISPs here are not accused of wrongdoing; they are conscripted as enforcement infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint must restrict or shut down Usenet access for their subscribers immediately, degrading a service most customers never used but which hosted significant illicit content.
- The three carriers absorb compliance costs and reputational exposure without any finding of liability — the price of avoiding a Cuomo lawsuit.
Second-order effects
- Other ISPs face pressure to follow suit or explain why they still carry Usenet, effectively ending mainstream carrier support for the protocol and pushing remaining users toward niche providers.
- Attorneys general in other states gain a template: negotiate directly with carriers over what network services may carry, bypassing both Congress and the FCC.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, intermediary liability becomes negotiable one state at a time, with platform and carrier behavior set by bilateral agreements rather than statute — a governance model later visible in everything from app-store takedowns to broadband regulation fights.
- It foreshadows the long-running tension between New York's AG office and ISPs that persists decades later, from consumer-protection suits against Charter to the state's battles with ISP lobby groups over affordable-broadband mandates.
The trend: State attorneys general are becoming de facto internet regulators, using settlement leverage over intermediaries to set content and access policy where federal law is silent.