AT&T has decided to block its customers access to Usenet. The move follows Comcast and Time Warner who pulled the plug on the aging service.

While the move is being claimed as part of a move to fight kiddie porn, it is equally likely to be due to pressure from the Entertainment business which has long seen Usenet as a hot bed of pirate distribution. While many Usenet users hoped that it would just be the 'binaries' section which would get banned, it appears the big US ISPs have decided
it is better safe than sorry.

Usenet is one of the oldest Internet communications systems around having been established in 1980 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. As such it pre-dates the World Wide Web. Traffic and posts to Usenet have increased, but that is mostly due to huge spamming operations that wallop each site.

While a few legitimate newsgroups still run on the site, the credibility of such operations has taken a hammering from blogs and yahoo groups which are more closely monitored.