Free internet of old headed to history books

Forget about net neutrality and torrent throttling, major ISPs are bringing up new issues to stir the public opinion. Verizon has unanimously limited access to Usenet for its subsribers, and three other big US internet providers reportedly announced plans to end unlimited access plans and switch to selling metered bandwidth.

Usenet, a vast, somewhat amorphous assembly of text and binaries, has been around long before HTML and web browsers. It is a global distributed discussion system, and one of the oldest network communications systems still in use. Usenet is organized within nine "hierarchies," each consisting of a large number of subtopics. The so-called Big 8 are the hierarchies that are regulated and organized under a set of consensual guidelines, while the alt* hierarchy is more of a free-for-all conglomeration of newsgroups.

Verizon will no longer include access to the alt* hierarchy in their service, as a part of a larger agreement between Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint to purge child pornography from the internet. This new Usenet restriction policy, however, prevents Verizon subscribers from access to a lot of legitimate newsgroups. And there you have it -- the Eternal September is finally over.

Another news that is likely to agitate proponents of a free and unregulated internet is that Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and AT&T are seriously considering to put an end to the "pay once, use all the bandwidth you can" policy. Currently, unlimited bandwidth is a common feature of many internet access plans the world over. If the big ISPs decide to change that and start charging per megabyte, the consequences can be very far reaching. You can argue that this will limit the spread of pirated content, to a degree, but on the other hand there is a a lot of perfectly legal, and good use for a wide pipe to the net. Will we see a new inequality on the internet? This concern is especially valid in a time of bandwidth-intensive web applications, VoIP and streaming video.

While the limits of anonymity on the internet and the spread of illegal information online are very valid concerns today, one cannot but wonder whether one day the grandchildren won't scoff at our incredulous tales of a free and wild internet.