FIOS - no usenet?

[navychop]

I was signing up for Verizon FIOS today, and learned that Verizon has drastically scaled back support for newsgroups. From this CNET article we get: "Verizon Communications confirmed on Thursday that it will stop offering its customers access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas, including the alt.* groups that have been a free-flowing area for discussions for over two decades."

Is this true? How can a major ISP cut people off from such a large part of the internet? Sure, you can subscribe elsewhere for the service, but why pay extra for something that is normally part of the basic service? Now I understand why this site supports access to alt.dbs.echostar.

 

[snathanb]

Is this true? How can a major ISP cut people off from such a large part of the internet? Sure, you can subscribe elsewhere for the service, but why pay extra for something that is normally part of the basic service? Now I understand why this site supports access to alt.dbs.echostar.

Because only us old-timers even know what usenet is.

 

[LER]

Plus, it probably costs them an arm and a leg for all that storage. When I worked for Internet America/AirNews, it was staggering how much infrastructure it took to run that service alone.

It's the most CapEx intensive part of the biz after telecomm.

 

[snathanb]

Plus, it probably costs them an arm and a leg for all that storage. When I worked for Internet America/AirNews, it was staggering how much infrastructure it took to run that service alone.

Seems they could just toss out the .binaries groups to get rid of the file sharing and that would bring the costs way, way down.

 

[navychop]

Well, deja news is no more, & I guess I don't use it so much anymore anyway. So I guess I suck it up, go w/ fios & do without, or <shudder> stay with the cableco.