Chuck Harris wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:

ISPs have NO common carrier protection of any sort...

Oh but they do! Otherwise they would be liable for all of the nasty
stuff goes over their feed. Things such as illegal downloads of copyrighted
material, software piracy, kiddie porn...

If the FCC has not given it the status of a common carrier, and it is
not regulated by a public utility commission, it is not a common carrier
under US law. European law may be different.

The degree to which an ISP is legally liable for the traffic they transmit
is still under discussion. Look at the Communications Decency Act, for
example, which makes the ISP liable for a lot of things which they legally
could not be if they had been declared common carriers.

Personally, I would prefer that they didn't attempt to be a censor of what
comes over my feed. There tastes might differ from my own. I would prefer
to control the filters.

But they have to be. Even setting retention and expiration times and
deciding which of the millions of newsgroups to carry and whether to
accept different kinds of control messages is in some way attempting to
"censor what comes over your feed." Your news admin has limited resources;
he can apply them toward getting more binaries groups, or he can apply them
toward extending retention times of existing groups. He can set things up
so that higher traffic groups expire faster. It is what news admins do.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."