But USENET is still being used and there are many people still using it. And there are places where you can signup for free access, this is one but there are many others:
One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET.
Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :) These days I have a rather large one compared to what I had many years ago. See a post you do not want to see anymore, add it to your killfile and maybe the person who sent it.
> One thing to remember, you never see a post from your teenage self on USENET being dragged up by your employer causing you to be fired or loose out on a job. Why, privacy still exists on USENET.
Google at one point did a very good job at indexing usenet posts and including them in their search results. If I searched for the name I used when posting to usenet, I would get hundreds of results of posts I made. But if I try searching now, very few results from usenet come up (perhaps because of the age of the posts).
> Also I guess he never heard of killfiles :)
I'm actually surprised he didn't mention that in his article.
This is (part of) the correct answer, yet it is way down the list of upvoted answers.
The story is:
1) There were a number of independent ISPs, but oligarchic forces, in addition to the Verizon/AT&T last mile monopoly consolidated things so that Verizon/AT&T became the ISP for most people, with limited competition.
2) Once consolidated, Verizon and AT&T killed their news servers. This mostly happened in 2008. The old Internet which was more open and peer-to-peer became a platform with end users limited mostly to web clients, consuming from big corporate upstream web servers.
3) This was helped along by various places in the US government, which blessed or even applied pressure to kill off the old peer-to-peer nature of the Internet, particularly Usenet, for the current model of big corporate web servers to end user customers.
Of course the public relations announcements were all of this was done for the litany of reasons companies and the government do anything - to protect customers/children/whatever, fight against the forces of evil etc.
That seems like it’s reversing cause and effect, though. If lots of ISP customers were using their nntp servers, ISPs would have been quite likely to maintain them in order to be competitive.
Because it was expensive to run such servers. Imagine dedicating 50-100 Mbps of constant bandwidth just to Usenet, and then explaining to management that 99.9% of Usenet was alt.binaries. We outsourced for a while, but even that cost was difficult to justify and none of our customers would admit to wanting it.
