usenet about to die?

[Kevin Brown]

> I've been hearing rumblings from folks I know that Usenet is going to
> be dropped by most (of not all) of the broadband providers. On top of
> this, the same providers will simply not tell their customers
> anything about it.
> 
> in some research, I came across this link on slashdot:
> 
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/18/1510259&from=rss
> 
> what we need is an intelligent and considered response to this. I use
> usenet to get answers for linux questions. if usenet goes away, so
> does access to some of my informational capability. We must consider
> usenet to be a public resource (much as IRC is and e-mail definitely
> is) and convince these broadband providers NOT to drop the ball here.
> 
> 
> comments?

Usenet differs from IRC in that if the ISP hosts it, it takes up a
significant chunk of drive space to hold that data (even a week's
worth).  Like IRC, there are plenty of places one can go to get usenet
access other than their ISP (in fact most IRC servers aren't run by an 
ISP).  Some are free, some aren't.  The ISP might
incur bandwidth costs for it, but then again, you are paying them for a
link and probably so is the Usenet provider (e.g. Easynews, etc...).