You touch on the very difficult legal conversation that was just bubbling up when the commercial providers stepped in: Companies that had their own Usenet serve

You touch on the very difficult legal conversation that was just bubbling up when the commercial providers stepped in: Companies that had their own Usenet servers had to not only keep a massive storage pool with serious bandwidth, but they were without question hosting illegal material. At a certain point before that it was flying under the radar: most people seemed to assume that it was just text since that’s all the technology supported, but of course 7-bit encoding, multi-part archives, and parity files all had changed that. Once the rights groups got wind, the clock was ticking Some “scene groups” chose to encrypt uploads and change post names, but that only served to splinter the usefulness of it since most of those became group specific. For everyone else, it was ISPs committing more and more resources to fighting to keep illegal files off their network, and end-users scrambling to either grab stuff fast before it was taken down, or move to a grey market “full archive“ provider for a fee. Somehow, as bittorrent took off, the newsgroup technology never ended up having to “pay the piper”. But that is definitely something that could happen very easily in current day.