Re:Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces
by dspillett on Thursday February 13, 2020 @10:30AM
(#22318434)
> RIAA ... especially after alt.binaries was sharing damn near everything
While this didn't help, I don't think it was a key factor for ISPs. Most ISP NNTP services didn't carry binary groups anyway for bandwidth cost reasons. There were some issues with groups that linked to where to find copyright covered material, but the RIAA and their ilk were going more for the direct sources at the time. The public list/pointer resources were actually useful to them as lists of places to chase down.
Of course this led to people paying for external NNTP services which did carry the binaries groups. These services were obvious targets for the RIAA and other such groups unlike the ISPs.
> they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has
This was a far more important reason, even without carrying binaries groups Usenet could consume a large amount of bandwidth. As well as the incoming load, and the bandwidth used sending data to clients, back then modem access was common and NNTP lead to people leaving the line open to download a huge pile of stuff (most of which they'd discard without reading anyway) meaning ISPs would have to invest in more modem racks, impose unpopular limits, or be perpetually busy, any of which would lose them custom.
Another significant issue was the cost of building and maintaining the servers required too. To run an NNTP service for a noticeable amount of users with reasonable performance you needed an arrangement with impressive IO performance stats for the time, and the access patterns (constant & random) could be murderous to the drives, sometimes chewing through them as fast as they could be replaced.
While this didn't help, I don't think it was a key factor for ISPs. Most ISP NNTP services didn't carry binary groups anyway for bandwidth cost reasons. There were some issues with groups that linked to where to find copyright covered material, but the RIAA and their ilk were going more for the direct sources at the time. The public list/pointer resources were actually useful to them as lists of places to chase down.
Of course this led to people paying for external NNTP services which did carry the binaries groups. These services were obvious targets for the RIAA and other such groups unlike the ISPs.
> they were big bandwidth sinks due to the distributed model usenet has
This was a far more important reason, even without carrying binaries groups Usenet could consume a large amount of bandwidth. As well as the incoming load, and the bandwidth used sending data to clients, back then modem access was common and NNTP lead to people leaving the line open to download a huge pile of stuff (most of which they'd discard without reading anyway) meaning ISPs would have to invest in more modem racks, impose unpopular limits, or be perpetually busy, any of which would lose them custom.
Another significant issue was the cost of building and maintaining the servers required too. To run an NNTP service for a noticeable amount of users with reasonable performance you needed an arrangement with impressive IO performance stats for the time, and the access patterns (constant & random) could be murderous to the drives, sometimes chewing through them as fast as they could be replaced.