Tom Watson wrote:

It looks to be the case that binaries will go first but there may
ultimately be a reduction or elimination of all Usenet service through
ISP's.

I wonder if that is all bad.

Nothing is ever all bad or all good. The fact that most anyone on the
internet can very easily participate in any newsgroup they want is quit
interesting in itself, and along with all the crap, you can be pretty
certain that many, many opinions will be heard on any given subject.
This to me is what makes Usenet a winner. Of course the bad side is all
the crap like trolls, spammers, porn freaks and so on, but with very
little effort, most of that can be filtered or otherwise skipped.

The corollary might be that an increase in the difficulty of obtaining
access, whether by necessitating a specialized provider, or by
reintroducing certain technical challenges to gaining access, might
reverse the trend and diminish the number of knuckleheads on Usenet.

Maybe it would be good to pay a few bucks a month to get newsgroups -
and maybe they should make setup and configuration sufficiently
challenging as to act as rough justice sort of bozo filter.

I'm not sure there would be enough providers around to make it all work.
Certainly in the days of the BBS, plenty of Sysops were around to make
it work in a small scale of what is going on today, but will that work
now via the internet? Not sure but my guess is most of the providers
like Giganews would disappear and traffic would drop to the point only a
few nut cases would be around to provide service for free. I know in
the days of the BBS's, about NO ONE knew what a BBS was, and certainly
nothing about echo mail. Today, almost no one knows anything about
newsgroups, even though they are usually free and right at their fingertips.

It's an interesting concept.

I will say that historically, if there is a need for something, someone
will find a way to fill it. Fidonet was great, and the internet killed
it. What I don't like is government or big business pulling the plug
just to pull the plug. Fidonet died due lack of need/interest, Usenet
dying because of some hackney's whim has a bad taste to me.

--
Jack
http://jbstein.com