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The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access. I think tha

The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access. I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.

SllX 3y ago
Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. No thanks. It is way easier for me to create and delete an account at any number of websites than it is for me to change ISPs; and I don’t need any bill on my internet bill when I can just Apple Pay for whatever.
- u801e 3y ago
  > Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. > I don’t need any bill on my internet bill I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.
  - SllX 3y ago
    > ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. Strictly speaking that’s not entirely true. 1. They could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service. 2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. 3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one. 4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. It would be untenable for all the reasons unmoderated forums are untenable, and also too unappealing to develop a Reddit-sized mass. The mods, for all the issues with Reddit’s mod community, are what make Reddit possible to continue to exist. You would need similar for any Internet social forum of a similar size, scope and user base and if that’s not the goal, plenty of niche forums already exist that you don’t need to get through your ISP. > I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't. Perhaps you misunderstood me. I don’t have an issue with the billing arrangements I have with my ISP. I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. In an age of pervasive payment tech like Apple Pay, I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives. I do still have the ISP-provided email address though, completely unused for the last 15 years and if they ever billed me separately for it, it would be terminated instantly.
    - u801e 3y ago
      > 1. [ISPs] could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service. Just as they could decide which websites you can visit, but, outside of government intervention, they normally don't. Similarly, they could limit which MX servers could connect to the ISP's MTA server, but they don't (not counting SPF, DKIM, and DMARC). Why would that be different for usenet? > 2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] case that the SCOTUS decided not to consider. The 9th US Circuit court ruled in favor of Reddit. Both Google and Twitter went through similar cases[2] and both prevailed. Would usenet fare any differently? > 3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one. I don't believe ISPs were ever considered common carriers[3] and this includes the period where usenet and email were commonly included with ISP internet access. > 4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. After Eternal September, usenet continued to function relatively well up till the time the attorney general of New York threatened to sue[4] a number of major ISPs over child pornography on usenet (which would be like a user's ISP being sued over the fact that they have child pornographic images stored in their ISP email account's inbox folder). This lead to many ISPs discontinuing their bundled usenet service which led to a significant reduction in the number of people connecting to usenet. > I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. Your ISP provides DNS services you can use to allow your computer to determine what server to connect to when you initiate a HTTP request with your web browser. You could choose not to use them and have your computer connect to an external DNS provider. Similarly, you could choose to use your ISPs MTA and have your mail client connect to it and issue SMTP requests to send your email to whomever you wish. So, if your ISP provided a NNTP server for your NNTP client to connect to, you can still choose to use another provider to connect to usenet. > I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. ISPs so far have never had separate line items for bundled services in their bill. Not for usenet, not for email, not for DNS. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. > Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives. I don't really see having to use third party service providers for every single service as a superior alternative. [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-declines-hear-bid-sue-reddit-over-child-porn-2023-05-30/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-declines-hear... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/18/politics/supreme-court-twitter-google-social-media/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/18/politics/supreme-court-twitte... [3] https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/why-its-a-good-thing-that-broadband-isnt-a-common-carrier https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/why-its-a-good-thing-that-bro... [4] https://www.techdirt.com/2008/07/22/andrew-cuomo-threatens-to-sue-comcast-if-it-doesnt-sign-up-for-his-plan-to-pretend-to-fight-child-porn/ https://www.techdirt.com/2008/07/22/andrew-cuomo-threatens-t...
  - threeseed 3y ago
    > ISPs are a common carrier Back then yes. Today ISPs and Telcos are the literal definition of the word insidious. So many examples of them selling user data to third parties without true consent.
JohnFen 3y ago
> they were simply borne by your ISP Well, not necessarily your ISP. I've never had an ISP that supplied Usenet feeds. But yes, the cost was borne by somebody that wasn't you. (Probably -- if you didn't have access to someone else's Usenet feeds, there were services that would provide one to you for a fee.)
- vram22 3y ago
  By univs and research labs too, among others. Probably corps too.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  ISPs in the 1990s often provided Usenet newsgroups. I had EarthLink dialup and had Usenet groups
  - u801e 3y ago
    They did up till around 2010 IIRC. The smaller ISPs had their own feeds, but eventually outsourced them. I remember the Path header containing the server name of the ISPs own NNTP server, but later it changed to supernews. ISPs also provided email accounts and I believe some provided a server directory for you to host your own website.
throw0101b 3y ago
> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero […] How expensive was Usenet if you took out storage/bandwidth for alt.binaries.*?
- kbenson 3y ago
  It's an almost irrelevant question because as soon as most nodes would stop carrying alt.binaries, posters would no longer respect the convention that binaries should go there, because users would want the data regardless of what their provider wants. Them it's a cat and mouse game like everything else, where binaries would just be split up more and obfuscated more. When the cost of storage and compute isn't really borne by the users, content limits are just challenges to overcome. Maybe if there was a total messages or bytes limit per user it might prevent using it for binary distribution, but those are painful for users to the degree it might kill usage enough to kill any hope of it continuing.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    bytes limits were overcome by segmenting rar files while including CRCs to overcome incomplete rar sequences. sharing of binaries will always happen. even if it's just to include a cat image (we all know that's not all, but just sayin).
    - safety1st 3y ago
      These days I think that isn't true anymore. There are a lot more ways to share files now, so if you threw up enough barriers people who want to do it would just go find another platform. I'd be completely fine with a Usenet type of protocol that disallows file attachments altogether, adoption might not be huge, but maybe that's fine - projects like Gemini and Mastodon are valuable for me even if they're not replacing the WWW and Twitter.
      - Danathar 3y ago
        I agree with this. Why go to all the trouble of getting around barriers when I could just post a DHT address of a trackerless BitTorrent swarm in a post?
bigbillheck 3y ago
> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero Famously so. "This message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars."
- dylan604 3y ago
  Back when we were going to charge a postage stamp for every email
- beej71 3y ago
  Thanks for this... I'd forgotten and now am feeling all nostalgic.
gorjusborg 3y ago
So what you're saying is that we should bring back AOL :)

SllX 3y ago

Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. No thanks. It is way easier for me to create and delete an account at any number of websites than it is for me to change ISPs; and I don’t need any bill on my internet bill when I can just Apple Pay for whatever.

u801e 3y ago
> Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. > I don’t need any bill on my internet bill I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't.
- SllX 3y ago
  > ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet. Strictly speaking that’s not entirely true. 1. They could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service. 2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. 3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one. 4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. It would be untenable for all the reasons unmoderated forums are untenable, and also too unappealing to develop a Reddit-sized mass. The mods, for all the issues with Reddit’s mod community, are what make Reddit possible to continue to exist. You would need similar for any Internet social forum of a similar size, scope and user base and if that’s not the goal, plenty of niche forums already exist that you don’t need to get through your ISP. > I'm billed monthly for internet access and have had this arrangement with multiple companies over the last 30 years. That bill used to include a ISP email account and usenet access. Now it doesn't. Perhaps you misunderstood me. I don’t have an issue with the billing arrangements I have with my ISP. I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. In an age of pervasive payment tech like Apple Pay, I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives. I do still have the ISP-provided email address though, completely unused for the last 15 years and if they ever billed me separately for it, it would be terminated instantly.
  - u801e 3y ago
    > 1. [ISPs] could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service. Just as they could decide which websites you can visit, but, outside of government intervention, they normally don't. Similarly, they could limit which MX servers could connect to the ISP's MTA server, but they don't (not counting SPF, DKIM, and DMARC). Why would that be different for usenet? > 2. USENET or a modern-day like-service as a separate billable item would not necessarily be subject to the same common carrier provisions that broadband service providers were subject to when they were regulated under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. Reddit was a defendant in a lawsuit[1] case that the SCOTUS decided not to consider. The 9th US Circuit court ruled in favor of Reddit. Both Google and Twitter went through similar cases[2] and both prevailed. Would usenet fare any differently? > 3. This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common carriers. Even if it hadn’t been or if they were to be reclassified under Title II, see point 2. I did try to see if this did change under the Biden administration but I have not heard of such a change nor could I find one. I don't believe ISPs were ever considered common carriers[3] and this includes the period where usenet and email were commonly included with ISP internet access. > 4. ISPs previously did not have the same incentive structure, and were dealing with a different market and legal environment prior to 2002. The truth is, USENET at the scale of Reddit could not exist without good moderation. After Eternal September, usenet continued to function relatively well up till the time the attorney general of New York threatened to sue[4] a number of major ISPs over child pornography on usenet (which would be like a user's ISP being sued over the fact that they have child pornographic images stored in their ISP email account's inbox folder). This lead to many ISPs discontinuing their bundled usenet service which led to a significant reduction in the number of people connecting to usenet. > I have an issue with the idea of getting billed for non-internet access services (read: content) through my ISP as a means of paying for them. Your ISP provides DNS services you can use to allow your computer to determine what server to connect to when you initiate a HTTP request with your web browser. You could choose not to use them and have your computer connect to an external DNS provider. Similarly, you could choose to use your ISPs MTA and have your mail client connect to it and issue SMTP requests to send your email to whomever you wish. So, if your ISP provided a NNTP server for your NNTP client to connect to, you can still choose to use another provider to connect to usenet. > I want a direct billing relationship with my service providers, not a stack of line items on my internet bill. ISPs so far have never had separate line items for bundled services in their bill. Not for usenet, not for email, not for DNS. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. > Put another way, I’m saying it is simply an unappealing arrangement when there are superior alternatives. I don't really see having to use third party service providers for every single service as a superior alternative. [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-declines-hear-bid-sue-reddit-over-child-porn-2023-05-30/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-declines-hear... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/18/politics/supreme-court-twitter-google-social-media/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/18/politics/supreme-court-twitte... [3] https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/why-its-a-good-thing-that-broadband-isnt-a-common-carrier https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/why-its-a-good-thing-that-bro... [4] https://www.techdirt.com/2008/07/22/andrew-cuomo-threatens-to-sue-comcast-if-it-doesnt-sign-up-for-his-plan-to-pretend-to-fight-child-porn/ https://www.techdirt.com/2008/07/22/andrew-cuomo-threatens-t...
- threeseed 3y ago
  > ISPs are a common carrier Back then yes. Today ISPs and Telcos are the literal definition of the word insidious. So many examples of them selling user data to third parties without true consent.

JohnFen 3y ago

> they were simply borne by your ISP Well, not necessarily your ISP. I've never had an ISP that supplied Usenet feeds. But yes, the cost was borne by somebody that wasn't you. (Probably -- if you didn't have access to someone else's Usenet feeds, there were services that would provide one to you for a fee.)

vram22 3y ago
By univs and research labs too, among others. Probably corps too.
SoftTalker 3y ago
ISPs in the 1990s often provided Usenet newsgroups. I had EarthLink dialup and had Usenet groups
- u801e 3y ago
  They did up till around 2010 IIRC. The smaller ISPs had their own feeds, but eventually outsourced them. I remember the Path header containing the server name of the ISPs own NNTP server, but later it changed to supernews. ISPs also provided email accounts and I believe some provided a server directory for you to host your own website.

throw0101b 3y ago

> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero […] How expensive was Usenet if you took out storage/bandwidth for alt.binaries.*?

kbenson 3y ago
It's an almost irrelevant question because as soon as most nodes would stop carrying alt.binaries, posters would no longer respect the convention that binaries should go there, because users would want the data regardless of what their provider wants. Them it's a cat and mouse game like everything else, where binaries would just be split up more and obfuscated more. When the cost of storage and compute isn't really borne by the users, content limits are just challenges to overcome. Maybe if there was a total messages or bytes limit per user it might prevent using it for binary distribution, but those are painful for users to the degree it might kill usage enough to kill any hope of it continuing.
- dylan604 3y ago
  bytes limits were overcome by segmenting rar files while including CRCs to overcome incomplete rar sequences. sharing of binaries will always happen. even if it's just to include a cat image (we all know that's not all, but just sayin).
  - safety1st 3y ago
    These days I think that isn't true anymore. There are a lot more ways to share files now, so if you threw up enough barriers people who want to do it would just go find another platform. I'd be completely fine with a Usenet type of protocol that disallows file attachments altogether, adoption might not be huge, but maybe that's fine - projects like Gemini and Mastodon are valuable for me even if they're not replacing the WWW and Twitter.
    - Danathar 3y ago
      I agree with this. Why go to all the trouble of getting around barriers when I could just post a DHT address of a trackerless BitTorrent swarm in a post?

bigbillheck 3y ago

> The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero Famously so. "This message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars."

dylan604 3y ago
Back when we were going to charge a postage stamp for every email
beej71 3y ago
Thanks for this... I'd forgotten and now am feeling all nostalgic.

gorjusborg 3y ago

So what you're saying is that we should bring back AOL :)