Usenet NEWS vs. Bittorrent

[Leo Mauler]

--- On Wed, 7/9/08, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:

> On Wednesday 09 July 2008, Jeffrey Watts wrote:
> > Well, to be honest nobody uses USENET News. 
> > "Nobody" meaning an insignificant percentage of 
> > users.  I bet 99% of the folks using the Internet
> > have never even heard of it.
> 
> > I don't think they should give a discount for a
> > service that nobody was using, but others may 
> > disagree.
> 
> They were still providing the service, and incurring 
> the cost of doing so.  Presumably, they passed that 
> cost onto the customers.
> 
> Now they are removing the service, which saves them 
> the cost of maintaining it. Why shouldn't that savings 
> be passed on?

This is true Jeffrey.  As you have been entirely too quick to point out, "things cost money", and in particular you have stated that NetNews costs ISPs quite a lot of money to provide, an expense which presumably raised the user fee quite a bit.

TWC shut off NetNews service, and yet billed fees remain the same.  From this we can conclude that you are mistaken in your cost estimate for a NetNews server, because TWC's example shows that it really costs very little time and money for an ISP to provide a NetNews server.  Cutting the "expense" of a NetNews server produces so little effect on the books that any price decrease would be insignificant.