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I'm not following - in part because I'm too young to have ever used Usenet/NNTP. Did you have to offer hosting binaries? My (limited) understanding is it's a de

• tptacek 7y ago
  You could technically, but your service would not survive, because the people who wanted binaries would loudly boycott you.
• joshspankit 7y ago
  This might help: - When someone hosted a usenet server, they were actually downloading (and keep in sync) a complete mirror of the sort of “globally agreed-on data”. This was part of it’s biggest appeal that the time of limited bandwidth: you could connect directly to your ISPs server with low latency and it wouldn’t matter how busy the other servers were. - The technology itself never supported binaries, it’s just that people figured out that you could encode binary data as text, post the text as a message, and have everyone else reverse the process. - Some providers actually chose to only host some of the groups (alt.binaries.movies would be an easy one to avoid hosting for example), but that offered limited help if people decided to upload pirated content to other groups. As the restrictions tightened, many discussion groups completely lost the ability to discuss things when a “scene group” came in and started uploading hundreds or thousands of files as messages. Looking back; I suspect that even if there was a restriction of 10KB per message and the same level of policing, piracy would still overwhelm usenet with millions of 10KB “messages” per HD movie