But how long until this archive also joins the Google graveyard? If it were another company aside from Google, this might be more encouraging.

Seems like this would be a great job for Internet Archive, but a cursory glance doesn't show it there. I get that the *.binaries could be too much and super illegal, but maybe the text ones.

Google has a history of not living up to that particular claim:

https://www.electricmonk.nl/log/2005/12/21/how-google-fucked...

https://thenextweb.com/news/google-groups-stopped-indexing-u...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jp5a77/google-a-search-compa...

https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/3ggogo/google_has_l...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.arch.embedded/c/zKo883p9AJQ

I doubt that corporations have the right intentions when acquiring public services. In fact, I'm inclined to believe there is a conflict of interest, and their objective may be to prevent these services from flourishing, or to sabotage them in the long term. Immediate sabotage would cause public outrage, so it's likely more subtle. This concern is evident in the recent acquisitions of GitHub and Twitter.

> You can continue to view and search for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 on Google Groups.

What about the newsgroups where access (including the archives!) had been blocked by Google for too much spam (maybe ironically facilitated by Google Groups in the first place)?

I guess one must ask El Reg to write about it. I think that might have been how it got solved a couple years ago when comp.lang.c and others were affected by this [1].

Currently, at least mozilla.support.seamonkey (not a USENET group, but from news.mozilla.org - which was shut down, but whose archived content would certainly be useful) is in that state at Google Groups. And yes, IIRC the only SPAM in recent times in that group had been posted via Google Groups...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/01/google_usenet/