On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Wim Lewis wrote:

In article q6f6k.61015$Ni1.7141@trnddc01, Al wrote:
If my access is denied, I will encourage my Senate and House delegations
to enact legistation that will restore my legitimate access to these
groups. I think the last thing you would want is more legislation on your
networks.

They're not really denying you access; they're just no longer running a
USENET server as part of their ISP business any more. You can still get
to those groups ... you'll just have to pay someone else for usenet
access. (Or get it for free from, say, aioe.org, or use google's lame web
interface, etc.)

As such I don't think this is something for the law to be involved in.
Verizon's decided to drop part of their service, but there's room in
the world for crappy ISPs alongside the good ones.

If Verizon decided to start blocking access to other companies' news
servers, or forge reset packets, etc., the way Comcast (allegedly?)
does, then you'd have something to write your representatives about.

You might be able to get out of any contract you have with them, on
the basis they've changed the service without renegotiating...
people seem to do that for cell-phone contracts a lot.

He'd better review all the fine print in his contracts, updates,
references to disclaimers, and consider that those high powered lawyers
have an interpretation somewhere that lets them do this and almost
anything else without recourse to the user.

--
Wim Lewis , Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1