This is (part of) the correct answer, yet it is way down the list of upvoted answers.
The story is:
1) There were a number of independent ISPs, but oligarchic forces, in addition to the Verizon/AT&T last mile monopoly consolidated things so that Verizon/AT&T became the ISP for most people, with limited competition.
2) Once consolidated, Verizon and AT&T killed their news servers. This mostly happened in 2008. The old Internet which was more open and peer-to-peer became a platform with end users limited mostly to web clients, consuming from big corporate upstream web servers.
3) This was helped along by various places in the US government, which blessed or even applied pressure to kill off the old peer-to-peer nature of the Internet, particularly Usenet, for the current model of big corporate web servers to end user customers.
Of course the public relations announcements were all of this was done for the litany of reasons companies and the government do anything - to protect customers/children/whatever, fight against the forces of evil etc.
The story is:
1) There were a number of independent ISPs, but oligarchic forces, in addition to the Verizon/AT&T last mile monopoly consolidated things so that Verizon/AT&T became the ISP for most people, with limited competition.
2) Once consolidated, Verizon and AT&T killed their news servers. This mostly happened in 2008. The old Internet which was more open and peer-to-peer became a platform with end users limited mostly to web clients, consuming from big corporate upstream web servers.
3) This was helped along by various places in the US government, which blessed or even applied pressure to kill off the old peer-to-peer nature of the Internet, particularly Usenet, for the current model of big corporate web servers to end user customers.
Of course the public relations announcements were all of this was done for the litany of reasons companies and the government do anything - to protect customers/children/whatever, fight against the forces of evil etc.