Time Warner-RoadRunner has made good on its threat to discontinue
UseNet. While they are wrapping themselves in Mom, The Flag, and Apple
Pie by claiming to be fighting kiddy porn, they are actually just
exercising their monopoly power to limit free speech by discontinuing
what is a cost sink rather than a profit source for them.

'Due to the combination of low subscriber usage and Acceptable Use
Policy issues, Road Runner has decided to discontinue Newsgroups service
as of June 23, 2008.'

My first inclination is to find an alternative provider for both
broadband and TV which TW-RR is currently supplying me. However, the
more I investigate, the more it's plain that both products are
thoroughly monopolized. So my decision for the moment is to stick with
the devil I know rather than switch.

But there is GOOD NEWS! After reading the previous discussions about
alternative UseNet sources, I'm trying out Aioe. It's free and so far
(just a few day's experience) it seems quite acceptable. It has a few
limits on the number of connections and it doesn't carry binary groups,
but neither of those restrictions hinder me.

In article nntp.aioe.org>,
Fred Moore gcfn.org> wrote:

HAHAHAHA!!! ...sorry, but that's fucking hilarious. A more truthful
explanation goes more like:

'Due to our complete incompetence and inability to maintain a reliable
Usenet feed (because of our commitment to using only Microsoft-branded
servers for news services in exchange for lucrative grants from
Microsoft), our customers have expressed dissatisfaction on a massive
scale many times over, and we've decided the only way for us to save
face is to completely remove news feeds from our offerings. This way
customers can no longer complain about our crappy news feed. Problem
solved the Time Warner way.'

In article nntp.aioe.org>,
Fred Moore gcfn.org> wrote:

You'd do well to also check out Tera News, too:

<http://teranews.com/>

Also, Usenet-News isn't bad at all and sells lifetime blocks of
bandwidth that never expire, which I find really cool:

<http://usenet-news.net/>

Finally, while it's not free, Individual.net is certainly dirt cheap
($15 a year), and is one of the best providers available on planet Earth:

<http://individual.net/>

Very highly recommended!

In article nntp.aioe.org>,
Fred Moore gcfn.org> wrote:

Well, it's not just that. ISPs are responsible for material that's
physically sitting on a server that they own and maintain; this is the
case with Usenet postings, they sit around for whatever retention span
has been set by the admin. No "common carrier" status is going to
protect them against charges of "hosting" pornography or whatever.
P2P is a bit different; the files pass across the the ISPs lines without
ever sitting on one of their servers. So "common carrier" can apply.

Like, if you take a Trailways bus from Winnipeg to Miami with the
intention of murdering someone, Trailways isn't a co-conspirator, it's
just the carrier. (On the other hand, that all changes if you announce
your intentions to the bus driver, and he does nothing about it.)

Jolly Roger pobox.com> wrote:

Not that this is particularly unique to TW. I've had multiple ISPs in
the past who probably would have been better advised to take that
approach. I ended up going to third-party usenet servers because I found
it worth the $5 or so per month to get service from someone who had that
as their primary business and thus had motivation to keep it working.

I happen to be on TW for my ISP at the moment, but I never got around to
trying their usenet feed, as already had a 3rd-party one when I moved
ISPs to TW. My prior ISP didn't have a usenet feed; the one before that
had one, but I got tired of having to complain all the time (and usually
to customer service reps who had no idea what a usenet service was, even
though their company offered one.)

In article nntp.aioe.org>,
Fred Moore gcfn.org> wrote:

Huh? There must be dozens of news servers out there than you can use,
both paid and free. If TW were the only Usenet game in town you might
have a point, but there's no free-speech issue here.

In article <02b73748$0$14092$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com>,
Warren Oates gmail.com> wrote:

In article
sn-radius.vsrv-sjc.supernews.net>,
"D.F. Manno" mail.com> wrote:

Thanks for your response, DF. Not to give you the short shrift, but I
posted my answer to this in a reply to Warren Oates. If you could read
it there, I'd appreciate it.

--Fred

In article individual.net>,
Jolly Roger pobox.com> wrote:

Fred Moore gcfn.org> wrote:

Or for that matter, dropping all "good old" US postal snail mail because
some people send porn via it. That certainly has a long history of
happening - a lot longer history than the net has at all. It certainly
happened back when I was a teen (about 4 decades ago). I can testify
first hand to that. :-) (Well, not first hand to the kiddie part, but
I'm sure that happened as well.) I rather suspect that the history of
sending porn via snail mail is more properly measured in centuries
instead of decades.