I did not know much about Usenet, so I went to the Wikipedia page and found this:
ISP-operated Usenet servers frequently block access to all alt.binaries. groups to both reduce network traffic and to avoid related legal issues.
This was the case years ago on the old news.iol.ie server; forgot all about it till now. That whole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Legal_issues section is quite interesting in light of the above; a recommended short read.
--
In general it seems that the network on which any system runs is pretty vulnerable to legal challenges. If not the ISPs, then maybe those pesky fibre and copper owners between them, for aiding and abetting copyright theft! Or maybe the ISPs might be coerced to only permit "Accepted" packet formats (ie inspect-able) to be used.
So far ISPs seem to not be caving in too quickly, but there have been some awful exceptions: the recent DNS seizures in the US, and a little closer to home our backbone-less Eircom being the only ISP in Europe to cave into the demand a few years ago to block access to piratebay.org (ex govt, careful).
However I shudder at the idea of a seperate darknet, it just seems so... unnecessary! Not to mention: "What are you doing honey?" "Oh I'm connecting to the Darknet." "Gee, isint that for pirates, hackers and perverts?". Though the ability for the common Jane to download mp3's and movies on it might have everyone secretly supporting it... hmm. I can only wonder at what the Internet will look like in 20 years time.
Personally I hope we all get UN mandated rules for unregulated Internet - China, North Korea and Iran being some of the leading examples for why this is so important.
I'm sure you know usenet still exists. It's weird to hear it described in the past tense. :)
Well, that sort of is the first rule of Usenet.
For those of you to young to remember, what you now call "The Internet" was originally "ARPAnet" (and then DARPAnet) which was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) but they had lots of rules about what you could and could not do on their network (as was their perrogative).
Some folks who wanted to be on the network didn't "qualify" because they were either too small, or not germane to the research goals. Other folks chafed at the restrictions.
My first encounter with the ARPAnet was in 1978 when I started at USC which had a node on the net (USC-ECLC) which was a DEC KI-20 running Tenex. When I graduated and went to work at Intel they weren't connected to the ARPAnet but they were running a 'usenet' node via modems and software called 'netnews'. The node, intelca, and the guy running it (Ken Shoemaker) were in my building at Intel. Since Ken was open to having the 'new guy' help out so I took on some fairly simple tasks of keeping it running.
Usenet was a simple store and forward network where nodes would call each other periodically on the phone and exchange data which was destined for other sites. Addressing was in the form of 'host!host!host!host!user' where each 'host' was a hop and if you could move something along you did.
Anyway, today, it is entirely possible (see the TOR network) to build a network which runs across the existing communications structure but uses a set of protocols that are 'invisible' (in the sense of firewalling and monitoring etc) to the host network. It makes building something which does what Usenet did (create a network with less authoritive oversight) much easier than it was in the past. I would not be surprised if such networks already existed although I am not aware of any at this time.