> 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.
> 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 This rule was also repealed under the Trump administration and broadband service providers are once again regulated under Title I, which is to say they are not classified as common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.
> 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. Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely.
2. That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause, but Title I and Title II are different parts of the 1934 statute passed by Congress under which the FCC claims its legal authority, and who they regulate and how they may do so.
3. Briefly under the Obama administration until they were reclassified again under the Trump administration, but I addressed it because of what you said here:
> ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.
Re: DNS
DNS is probably a core service. Yes there are third parties but if I had to supply my own DNS service, an Internet service provider would not be a very good Internet service provider seeing as how their core function is access to the Internet. I’d like to see how long an ISP would last without providing customers with a DNS resolver though, that could be fun.
> 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.
Telephone, cable, home security and various streaming services they either own or have relationships with. Comcast even has an MVNO. We don’t live in a world where most ISPs are merely ISPs and a lot of them repurpose that infrastructure to provide other services. We don’t have to talk about ISPs in a vacuum.
Also remember the original context of my first comment in this chain. I was responding to this:
> 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.
I’ve re-read that a few times and wondered if I misread the spirit of this text and whether I should have replied the way I did or not, but independent of whether I have or not, please read what I wrote with the appropriate context when you respond. I wasn’t addressing whether ISPs did something, I was addressing the appeal of being billed this way vs on my credit card without the additional layer of obfuscation.
Put another way: ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing. We have a million social networks and even communities with paid memberships. When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.
There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation.
> Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely.
That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints.
> That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause
That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet. Given the widespread use of encryption, ISPs wouldn't be able to tell whether someone is using a service over HTTPS on port 443 or some other application level protocol using the same port.
Though if ISPs did place substantial limits in their bundled usenet service, then people would choose other ISPs or 3rd party services and/or complain. Just as they would if their ISPcs SMTP server wouldn't send messages to certain domains or if their web browser was blocked from accessing certain websites.
> DNS is probably a core service.
The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required. Discounting TLS certificate validation, I could connect to a remote server using their IP address instead of their hostname.
ISPs used to provide documentation instructing the end user how to connect to email, usenet, and how to set up their router or computer to access the internet. This could involve access credentials, DNS settings, etc.
> ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing.
Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.
> When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.
That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.
> There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation
Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.
> That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints.
I am not disputing the reason. You are correct about that. This is still an example of an enforcement action, or moderation, on the part of the ISPs. Just as an aside, that prosecutor was Andrew Cuomo.
> That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet.
No worries. And no, its repeal didn’t make much of a difference. If I’m remembering correctly, the Title II classification came in 2015 and this was undone in 2017, so not much time for the FCC to settle in and really do anything with their newly claimed powers over broadband service providers under Title II although it’s worth noting the drum beat of the pro-net neutrality crowd has been noticeably absent these past 5 years even with the change back which is certainly a change from prior to the Title II classification in 2015.
> The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required.
I was making a business observation, not a technological observation. An ISP could try to run their business like that. It would also not be a good idea if they intend to stay in business. Nobody signs up for an ISP expecting to BYODNS even though 3rd party DNS resolvers do exist (and I use one myself).
> Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.
That’s a personal choice. You can prefer that, but my argument against why I don’t is because I prefer as direct a billing relationship with my service providers as I can get. This offers me two things: direct insight into what every single line item on my CC statements is buying me and for what price, and also staves off the middlemen businesses that when they get too big for their britches more often than not try to exploit that status as the middlemen.
Often times middlemen are unavoidable or nearly so from an economic perspective in other contexts: a supermarket for example stands between me and the farmers. That relationship often gives them power over the farmers that can assist me in getting a known quantity in terms of item quality but may actually force producers to operate or behave a certain way. That’s meatspace though, literally and figuratively, but even in cyberspace given a choice, I prefer the direct relationship over the indirect one.
> That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.
As I stated above, I am not disputing the threat of a lawsuit. But if USENET was growing and a potential profit center for ISPs at that time, it would have been easier to make the choice to fight for it in court. A lawsuit isn’t a guaranteed victory for the one who brings it, but it wasn’t even worth defending to them, and in fact it had become a liability.
> Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.
As long as you are using someone else’s hosted service whether it’s AT&T’s pre-2008 NNTP services or Reddit in 2017 or Hacker News in 2023, your free speech rights are subject to the hosted service’s owners free speech and property interests. In a direct conflict on the service itself, yours loses. If it’s your server, then yours wins.
USENET in its heyday existed in a very different culture, legal environment and economy than today. USENET at only 1993’s scale can do just fine cultivating that same culture as before, but if all you want is the size of 1993’s user base that isn’t very ambitious, and it’s not like NNTP is a particularly nice experience compared to Instagram, Snapchat, Discord or really just name any social media service since 2004.
If you took 1993’s USENET and scaled it to 500 million users today, the same largely hands-off moderation policies of the cabal of hosts that provided users access to the service could not stand and they would have to change from that time, not because of specifically former New York prosecutor Andrew Cuomo, but because of pretty much all prosecutors everywhere they operate. Section 230 is a nice liability shield, but it can still be pierced with a good case.
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.