> It seems that the past 6 years or so saw most big ISP's dropping USENET support claiming mostly piracy concerns. Was it piracy or the fact that it's tough for the government to control what people say on USENET?
No conspiracy theories needed here.
Copyright infringement is one angle; the other is that it costs ISPs a huge amount of resources for something few people use.
Once upon a time, a single server could easily mirror all of USENET for all users of an ISP, and almost every user expected it, so they'd treat it as an essential part of the service. Now, it would take far more storage to do so, and almost nobody expects it, so why should an ISP provide it? It's easier to let people get USENET from a third-party service, and it'd be a better experience for the people who actually want it, too.
If an ISP has resources to burn and wants to make their technical users happy, they'd get far better results for more users if they provided things like local Linux distribution mirrors instead. Far more users would make use of that than USENET.
And if they want to make the vast majority of users happy, and save resources on their end in the process, they can provide local CDN nodes for YouTube, Netflix, and similar.
No conspiracy theories needed here.
Copyright infringement is one angle; the other is that it costs ISPs a huge amount of resources for something few people use.
Once upon a time, a single server could easily mirror all of USENET for all users of an ISP, and almost every user expected it, so they'd treat it as an essential part of the service. Now, it would take far more storage to do so, and almost nobody expects it, so why should an ISP provide it? It's easier to let people get USENET from a third-party service, and it'd be a better experience for the people who actually want it, too.
If an ISP has resources to burn and wants to make their technical users happy, they'd get far better results for more users if they provided things like local Linux distribution mirrors instead. Far more users would make use of that than USENET.
And if they want to make the vast majority of users happy, and save resources on their end in the process, they can provide local CDN nodes for YouTube, Netflix, and similar.