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Cox Discontinues Usenet, Starting In June
Existential Wombat was one of several readers to note that Cox Communcations customers have been put on notice that their Usenet access will soon dry up, unless they want to pay a monthly surcharge for it. From the note that subscribers received: "Effective June 30, 2010, Cox Communications will discontinue Usenet service to our subscribers. Declining newsgroup usage in recent years has highlighted the need to focus our resources on other priorities, such as increasing our Internet speeds and providing new services, including Cox Media Store and Share. We understand that our newsgroup subscribers may want to continue accessing Usenet. Therefore, we have worked with leading newsgroup service provider Giganews to offer special pricing for Cox subscribers."
Gripes Existential Wombat: "$15++ a month for something Cox provided as a part of the service? Of course they will be reducing everyone's monthly tariff by the value of the service they no longer provide. Yeah, right."
The "newsgroup" service that Usenet was designed for is now superseded by Google Groups (who absorbed DejaNews, the site that aimed to archive every Usenet post ever), zillions of web forums, blogs, comment friendly sites like, um, the one you're reading this on called Slashdot... get the point?
What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files. The average "$100 for a limited time for a Triple Play of Internet, TV and Phone" user doesn't know it exists and wouldn't use it anyway. So, if you really want it, pay for it. The pay-for Usenet providers exist because the ISPs wanted to limit or eliminate this service and have have done so for years.
This is a price hike for those who want to use an obscure feature that should lead to better service or lower costs for those of us who care about those things more than a supply of illegal content. If you want to get one HBO show... this price will likely make it more cost effective for you to get HBO through your TV pipe, a reduction of traffic on the Internet that should make your community's connection work better.
What's a usenet?
Who cares?
They capped the bandwidth to it and limited it to 4 connections.
Usenet is pretty much dead except for piracy, subsumed by specialty web forums for those who are after communication rather than warez. And if you still want it for communication, Google Groups offers a free gateway IIRC.
EG, NNTP may still be a huge amount of some ISPs traffic (eg, see this paper, http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/imc102-maier.pdf ) but it is almost ALL binary transfers.
So its not a shock that Cox is getting rid of its Usenet servers, whats only shocking is that it took them so long.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Oh, great. There goes my sex life.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Does anybody who doesn't use IE for a newsreader expect their ISP to provide decent feeds? Anybody I know who's still there is using GigaNews or one of the other premium services.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
News readers are a lot more lightweight than web browsers, can deal with the format intelligently. That's what I'll miss when Cox (my ISP) drops Usenet. How big are browsers now, to make use of the all the funky Ajax features, that basically just simulate what I could do with trn in a terminal window 20 years ago?
Constitutionally Correct
You can get them for free with google. But if you want the one with the goodies you can always pay an overseas server for around $11USD per month unlimited :). And I like it that not many people know about it. And if someone findsout about it the person would just usually give up because they would find it too difficult with the pars and the rars and what not.
Is way better than netflix, CATV, ondemand and torrents put together. I love my binaries
I love my newsgroups. I use them as backup.
Maybe they'd use gmail instead of hotmail today, but the same principal applies.
"We believe the group of customers that use this service is small enough to not be able to start a revolt, and large enough that we'll see some profit from charging extra. We would do this to the 'using Google' service if we thought we could get away with it. Please ignore how badly this conflicts with our claims that Net Neutrality would destroy the internet, and that we're a self-policing market who wouldn't dare charge people more for certain types or destinations of traffic."
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
Sure, you've got Google groups, but they're privately owned and moderated by Google.
Usenet is the only distributed, unmoderated message "board" out there that isn't bound by one particular owner's or government's rules. It may not seem important now, but free anonymous and uncensored posts can be very important sometimes...
Usenet has been heading the way of the dinosaurs for quite a few years. By today's standards, it's difficult to use (requires more than a web browser), has a somewhat cumbersome hierarchy and, especially in the case of alt.*, bloated with SPAM.
The resources required for an ISP to proved a full Usenet feed to its subscribers are enormous and provide very little (read: none) return for the ISP.
Some might balk at having to pay "extra" for Usenet access (mainly people that refuse to acknowledge that this is 2010, there are better alternatives, and providing access and storage for the behemoth that is Usenet costs a metric ass-ton of cash), I for one don't. At least with pay services, you get decent retention time and at least some assurance you are getting a full feed if that is what you are after.
And at the end of the day, the majority of people using the Internet today have no idea what Usenet is, or could give 2 shits about it.
To you perhaps it is, but others its not.
Also, while i agree there are things such as Google groups that are similar, its still not Usenet, and if you weren't a snot nosed kid, you would understand the difference. ( hint, one is distributed, another is a single point of failure/control, for starters. )
And ya, Usenet isn't what it used to be due to the dumbing down of the net due to the influx of idiots "oooh, click, its pretty", but it still has a place, especially as governments try to crack down on information freedoms.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Usenet has pretty much digressed into an unregulated binary file distribution network. People who want it for discussion will use a web based news reader. People who use it do download files in a non p2p way will subscribe though cox or somebody else.
something new to throttle!
Cox confirms it - usenet is dying
AT&ROFLMAO
Sure, you've got Google groups, but they're privately owned and moderated by Google.
Usenet is the only distributed, unmoderated message "board" out there that isn't bound by one particular owner's or government's rules. It may not seem important now, but free anonymous and uncensored posts can be very important sometimes...
I won't seem important until no one has it. Unregulated and anonymous communications are one thing every bad guy wants to stop.
I use thunderbird for news, and I absolutely consider a news feed as part of the services an ISP should provide.
That said, mine just funnels the requests to a dedicated usenet provider.
What.is.Usenet?
Usenet has been heading the way of the dinosaurs for quite a few years. By today's standards, it's difficult to use (requires more than a web browser), has a somewhat cumbersome hierarchy and, especially in the case of alt.*, bloated with SPAM.
You can say the same thing about World of Warcraft. So? It is still important to many, and a substantial reduction in service.
The resources required for an ISP to proved a full Usenet feed to its subscribers are enormous and provide very little (read: none) return for the ISP.
A reduction in bandwidth? That was the original purpose after all. You only have to make that posting pass your transit once. It doesn't work so well now, since everyone reposts to get over drops and short retention times. Ooops...
Some might balk at having to pay "extra" for Usenet access (mainly people that refuse to acknowledge that this is 2010, there are better alternatives, and providing access and storage for the behemoth that is Usenet costs a metric ass-ton of cash), I for one don't. At least with pay services, you get decent retention time and at least some assurance you are getting a full feed if that is what you are after.
True. Giga news is better. So farm it out (It is only a few people by their admission) or reduce the fees. What? You just want to cut service and give me nothing back? I wonder why people are upset?
And at the end of the day, the majority of people using the Internet today have no idea what Usenet is, or could give 2 shits about it.
And the majority of people could care less about NASIOC, or Slashdot, or 4chan, or lolcatz, or porn... OK, not the last one. :) So what marginal cost is next? Bittorrent? No, that was the last one. (And I am a Linux dev, so I actually have a legal use for it)
www.eternal-september.org
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
No more Usenet cabal?!? End of an era!
Now where are we going to go for our cancel control messages?!?
-- Terry
For years most ISP's have dropped most if not all the alt.binaries.* due to copyright, viruses, etc... hence the boom in giganews and their competitors. Out of the 3k customers on my WISP I would say that I have maybe 10 people that use our nntp box. I have often thought of doing the very same thing due to it is one more time sink for me to have to deal with for less than 1% of my users. Would I give a discount for discontinuing said service? Absolutely not. I've always looked at it as a free perk for my customers and with so few using it why would it constitute a drop in service fee? If one of the few users that do use it contacted us I wouldd most likely give them a month free for the inconvenience but never a drop in their subscription price.
If only I had the bargaining power to cut a deal like Cox... at least they're doing something for their customers.
You can say the same thing about World of Warcraft. So? It is still important to many, and a substantial reduction in service.
Maybe, but people *PAY* to play/access World of Warcraft.
A reduction in bandwidth? That was the original purpose after all. You only have to make that posting pass your transit once. It doesn't work so well now, since everyone reposts to get over drops and short retention times. Ooops...
Yes, perhaps an ISP would see a reduction in bandwidth by not directly providing Usenet services, but that's not the only resources required. The biggest single resource Usenet consumes (and we are talking about a *full* feed here - no exclusing alt.binaries.*) is STORAGE. The close second is the servers themselves.
True. Giga news is better. So farm it out (It is only a few people by their admission) or reduce the fees. What? You just want to cut service and give me nothing back? I wonder why people are upset?
Perhaps. However, an ISP does have the right to change their terms of service and service offerings, like any other provider of a service. If you don't like the change, you find an alternative.
And in this case, Cox is farming it out, albeit, passing the cost of doing so to the consumer, which is subjectively crappy.
And the majority of people could care less about NASIOC, or Slashdot, or 4chan, or lolcatz, or porn... OK, not the last one. :) So what marginal cost is next? Bittorrent? No, that was the last one. (And I am a Linux dev, so I actually have a legal use for it)
Usenet is *not* a marginal cost by any stretch of the imagination. The number of servers and the continually growing amount of storage required to provide this service in house are *huge* costs. I am sorry, your reasoning here fails.
They could get rid of that OTHER back alley of seamy, scummy crap known as craigslist.
I have a feeling the "who cares about usenet" geeks will change their tune when ACTA arrives and ISP's are shutting down their beloved torrent sites.
Google Groups is horrible. They totally ruined DejaNews. They couldn't and can't monetize it so they just fuck with it -- but they will still copyright it to within an inch of it's life. They had no respect for the value of usenet. It was the #1 source for programming information during the 90's and I still miss it. We are living in Orwellian times, and "He who controls the present, controls the past". I would vote you up a million times.
Perhaps one can serve usenet in a rack, but that's so very not likely. Daily usenet traffic is measured in the hundreds of gigabytes and maintaining a local cache of that traffic means hundreds of gigabytes of traffic even if NO ONE ACCESSES IT. Whether you have one subscriber or 1000 using that local cache of traffic, the very act of maintaining a local cache means more inbound /0 traffic, more overhead in the form of support costs and maintenance costs, and dealing with an ever spiraling demand for more space.
Anyone who thinks usenet is dead is seriously uninformed. Easynews has gajillions of subscribers and they provide access to binaries groups directly via the browser - no need to learn t use nzbs or nntp clients unless you really want to. Easynews, Giganews and even Astraweb provide access to usenet in a way no other local ISP likely has for a decade now. I understand Cox has had very good usenet service but that just makes the point ever more: it costs real money to provide this service! Cox also has the problem of serving as an illicit gateway - a good bit of the illegal stuff posted to usenet has come through rooted windows machines sitting on the Cox network. By eliminating their pool of nntp resources they shift that security problem off onto Giganews, an ISP that focuses directly on providing this service.
Supernews.com provides a great service for less than $12 per month. Cox is not doing its customers any favors by offering the overpriced substitute.
What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files. The average "$100 for a limited time for a Triple Play of Internet, TV and Phone" user doesn't know it exists and wouldn't use it anyway. So, if you really want it, pay for it. The pay-for Usenet providers exist because the ISPs wanted to limit or eliminate this service and have have done so for years.
Actually I've found the Big 8 outside of the alt.* crap pretty good for a variety of topics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_8_(Usenet)
Of course most people have moved on from Usenet (or never joined it), but personally I find web forums to have absolutely atrocious interfaces. I much prefer Usenet and mailing lists. There's also the fact that killfiles aren't available on web forums.
*blonk*
The $15/month is _not_ what you'll be paying.
The real price is $30/month. It's a crazy price. It's Giganews' "Diamond" plan that has no quota and has vpn. This is the one you want if you have a peg leg, hook prosthetic, eye patch, single gold hoop earring, and a parrot on your shoulder. If you buy this, you have more money than sense.
If you use usenet as originally intended, i.e. text only, the Giganews' price is $3/month. But then there are free nntp servers that carry only text groups anyway.
Highwinds (Cox's usenet) has always sucked anyway. It was always slow and cantankerous.
For those of you saying "hurr, use google groups": shut up. The interface is made of dead babies and week old roadkill. Decades old slrn is better.
--
BMO
This sucks Cox.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
it works damn good
...for a community that loves to bash companies about "buggy whips" and "adapt or die", we sure do love to hold onto our outdated, largely useless tech ourselves, don't we?
Translation of the previous sentence for the benefit of Moderators: "Please mod this comment down to the 13th level of Hell"
"People who want it for discussion will use a web based news reader. "
No. Never. You can pry my curses based news reader from my cold dead fingers.
Web based news readers suck. Google Groups is the worst offender.
--
BMO
I partially kid, but seriously, as someone who reads /. and other tech-ish webnews pages as well as plays too many video games and even some that involve dice...I've never used Usenet or even had a desire too and neither have any of my IT friends. Sure, if you ask them what it is they'll tell you, they'll even rattle off some services that have replaced them, but when you ask them "Have you ever used Usenet?" they'd tell you know.
Granted, me and my friends are not the majority of /. readers, but given that this is a niche community to begin with I fail to see why anyone would really want to hold on to the past when there are new better tools to find information and hell, even better ways to pirate shit these days...speaking of Piracy I remember in high school when IRC was the best way to download shit, then it was using IRC to get a Text file and using an FTP app, then it was napster, then it was limewire, then those died and now it's bittorrent and thepiratebay.org - in a couple years something will replace that, lets build a bridge and get the fuck over it...
Ave Molech Setting
For those not interested in Binaries (porn, warez, movies) then there are still plenty of free or cheap Usenet suppliers.
A quick search of google will reveal a number.
If you don't trust a free server then for 5 dollars you can get 10gig access to usenet at NewsDemon. It lasts a year. 10 Gig not enough for a years worth of text based reading then for about 20 dollars you can get 100gig.
Cox had a news server?
I've been paying them for broadband forever, and I never knew that.
Which is why I've also been paying Easynews for NNTP forever...
Fuck Cox.
...that we don't talk about Usenet.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm on Cox, and did not take the news happily. Basically, they're removing a service I DO use, and replacing it with services I don't need. Their so-called special offer is so lame and laughable, it borders on fraud. The one thing I can do is go back to our city government, which grants Cox their franchise, and convince them to open it for bidding when the current agreement expires.
The responses I got from their "customer (dis)service department" show that they care very little about their customers. They just want our money.Time to go look at alternate vendors.
Play it cool, play it cool, 50-50 fire and ice.
If you don't like it, just take your business to one of the many alternate ISP choices that are no doubt available in your area! Oh, wait...
Cox usenet carries a small subset of channels, that are all tame enough to pass the iPhone App store test. If you want meaningful usenet access you'll have to pay for it.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
There is something about ISP Usenet servers that I don't think I understand correctly.
It seems that Cox, an ISP, is going to be shutting down their Usenet server soon. What this server has done until now is communicate with other Usenet servers on the internet to synchronize and update posts. Cox subscribers were allowed to connect to the Cox Usenet server to read and write posts.
Now, for whatever reason, Cox wishes to take down its server. So, why can't people who like to use Usenet connect to some other ISP's Usenet server? If other ISPs don't like non-subscribers connecting to their Usenet servers, then why aren't there a few free Usenet servers out there on the internet? There are plenty of other free services, like Google Groups, Flickr, Facebook, Ubuntu Forums, etc. Is there something about the Usenet NNTP port 119 protocol that makes it not work as well as HTTP port 80 based free services?
I've read up some on Usenet, though I've never gotten around to even finding out if my ISP or my university has a Usenet server, but I've never figured out why there are no Usenet servers available for the general public. And if there are, then why are the Cox people complaining? Is there anything bad about switching to a free general public Usenet server?
problem solved without upsetting legit users?
Its really the only broadcast medium left on the network. I sometimes prefer usenet and wading thru its crap to message boards full of nonsensical ads and incompetent nazi administrators who delete messages they don't agree with. When a message board looses a disk drive or closes up shop or silences posts the information on that board is lost forever. Usenet requires global coordination to remove messages once distributed thru the network.
When looking for answers/information usenet was always what I went to first and the web second until a few years ago as PHPBB et al took over. All of the crap in the google search results today means the network is less useful to me today than it has been in the past.
Usenet does not have to look like your great great grandfathers qwik reader and there is always a place for local PHPBBs. There is also a place for Usenet via google groups, microsoft..etc. As a distribution topology there is nothing on the planet like usenet.
I never understood the sentiment some have that any old technology must suck. The earth is >4 billion years old - perhaps you would be happier if you found a newer planet to live on? Say one only a few hundred years old with seas of liquid iron?
This can only be win-win.
1. Your bill is reduced by $15.
2. Giganews has 622+ days of binary retention - the best in the industry. If you're not satisfied with the plan that the $15 provides:
3. Usenet Compare find another plan. Unlimited plans start from $8 depending on provider.
4. Spend the extra $7 on a loved one.
Freenet people, freenet.
(Oddly appropriate captcha: liberty)
cocks
Morpheus, God of Dreams.
Perhaps. However, an ISP does have the right to change their terms of service and service offerings, like any other provider of a service. If you don't like the change, you find an alternative.
Why should they have this right? Why should any provider have this right?
Agreed on the 3rd party email. I can't believe that people get themselves tied up with an ISP or, worse, their workplace for their personal email account. But I'd still be reluctant to establish myself with any commercial provider for my main email account. Google isn't evil today, but they might be in a few years.
I use my alma mater for my permanent address. They've been around for almost two centuries and their mission statement includes "communicating, preserving and applying knowledge" rather than "turn a profit by any means necessary", so I trust them to be around and act in my interest for the extent of my life. Right now I pay them $10 a month for my email and web space, but they'll forward emails for free if I ever want to go the cheap route.
I had a Giganews account once. I tried to cancel it but they kept charging me. It finally ended when my card was compromised and I was issued another number. I got an email from them that month complaining that their charge against my old card was rejected. It's unfortunate that this is the only easy solution for dealing with these bastards.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
For those of us who use only text, paying for usenet is incredibly cheap. When my ISP quit offering usenet, I paid some piddling amount of money to astraweb.com and got 25 Gb worth of usenet access. Two years later, I've only used some miniscule fraction of that 25 Gb. Actually, I'm happier now than I was before. Back when my ISP was still supposed to be providing usenet access, it was unreliable, and when I would call their tech support, I would invariably get somebody who didn't know what usenet was. I got one guy who kept saying that I would have to call the Usenet Company and take it up with them.
Find free books.
Speaking as a Cox subscriber, I can say that Cox is a poor-quality ISP overall, and this move, while disappointing, does not surprise me.
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
They just "nickel and dime you to death." Next thing, they will change you for every time you get up from your TV or PC to go to the bathroom. Unlike the airlines, they almost have a local monopoly. Why don't they just raise their rates and be done with it?
Those guys at Cox are dicks.
>>1. Your bill is reduced by $15.
Hilarious
+1, Funny
I don't see what the problem is because the Comcast usenet service was pitiful. The 'usenet' service that was available to Comcast users (including me) included a whopping 1 day of binary retention, and maybe 120 days of text retention. Anyone who seriously uses usenet would have a better service than comcast's. In fact this will be a benefit for me, because I can go back to giganews who I love but hated paying $30/mo for $15/mo, which is what I'm paying for another good but slightly inferior usenet service. So actually this won't be a big loss for 95% of usenet using comcast subscribers who are themselves a small fraction of comcast subscribers.
Usenet is the only distributed, unmoderated message "board" out there that isn't bound by one particular owner's or government's rules.
Yes. It's one of the few things on the Internet that really is still "peer to peer".
There are still useful forums for Python, MySQL, the C and C++ standards committees, and such. It's useful, for example, that Oracle doesn't control "comp.databases.mysql".
It's also much easier to deal with a large number of Usenet groups than a large number of random forums systems.
I'm a Cox customer in AZ. I have to say honestly...nothing of value has been lost here. Anyone that seriously uses Usenet does not use the Usenet that their ISP provides. It is atrocious. Completion is awful, retention is laughably small, and it's quite frankly not worth using.
I've been with them for quite a long time. I have no idea why the guy a few posts up thinks they suck...except that maybe their help desk people are idiots. I've pretty well come to expect that and after working at my own job for a while and talking to other ISPs to help people out, I've concluded that they are ALL fucking morons. A pretty vast number of people in call centers are mindless idiots who don't know what they're doing and are just following the steps. Not a script per se, or even a flow chart, they're just doing what people have said worked and have no idea why. That is why when something unexpected comes up...mind fucking blown.
At any rate, I am not surprised about this at all. No one uses their ISP's usenet service anymore. They're awful. My current provider has over a year of binary retention. Cox has like...less than a month. This service is USELESS because they haven't invested enough time and effort into it because they have better things to do. Hell, they've bumped our bandwidth caps up for free several times over the years I've had them and I don't expect them to lower the price of their service for dropping a completely useless service. Not useless in that no one uses it...useless in that it was piss poor to begin with. They just had it there because it's always been there.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
I used to go to several useful groups for advice on things like home repair, puzzles, folk music. The folks from the dark side of the web took it over. I gave up on it like many other folks. I still miss the good groups. Too bad.
Question, what did Cox do when the canceled Usenet?
Did they block all traffic coming from and going to ports 119 & 433, or did they just stop caching the feed at their servers (ie.nntp.cox.com)?
you have dumbfucked me with your capacity in combining seemingly irrelevant concepts all together in a mesh to troll another person successfully.
Read radical news here
This is actually a very good thing - I've had an encrypted Giganews account for awhile and love it. I went with them when road runner got rid of theres. Giganews just came out with an internet encryption service that comes with unlimited accounts that tunnels all of your internet traffic using VPN. Giganews doesnt just have the best newsgroups service with the longest retention, but theyre also huge advocates for net freedom in general. I don't have cox cable, but Giganews will give better newsgroup access anyway over the free cox one.
Easy to fix. Setup a server, allow public access, and distribute it.
I can see why they're getting rid of it. They're not blocking it, just no longer hosting it. You can easily setup your own given time/money/pipe to do so.
Really? Because I've used it virtually every day for many years, and haven't noticed doing anything except what it's always done : Unhindered information exchange between people.
I guess that is unacceptable in the United Corporations of America, though. -shaking head- where has the Independent spirit of America gone? It's like there's no more fight in y'all. When you do fight, it's over name-calling and gang territory, and for that, you're willing to gun each other down. Man, if you're going with a socialist-style economy (health care, copyright/ACTA, corporate bailouts, state-sanctioned monopolies), you'd better take back control, put it in the hands of elected representatives (sure, they may not do it well, but it's better than having the megalomaniacs do it), before it requires rebellion.
I've been buying Usenet from a provider for ages (megabitz.net). It's better than my experience with ISP-provided news was anyway.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Actually, it costs Cox to have Usenet on tap, because their Usenet implementation has been outsourced to Highwinds for years. It's moderately annoying to lose it, especially as the overall price won't drop, but what's been lost here is actually no great shakes -- there's low caps on both connections (4) and speed, and the retention is 30 days if you're lucky. No SSL either, which has become pretty standard. Yes, it means paying for an alternative...although it doesn't have to be Giganews. Astraweb works very well, and is fairly low cost on their unlimited plans, and if Astraweb is too costly and you don't care about posting access, there's Cheaper, which has plans starting at $4 a month the last I looked.
cox suck!
Am I the only one who read the title wondering what Alan Cox has to do with Usenet ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
no more cox on usenet... i'll no longer have to preview the thumbnails
So, if you have any long-term commitment to them, you can now break it with no penalty.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
When Comcast dropped the included newsgroup services, I switched to Eternal September. Works great with Thunderbird.
http://www.eternal-september.org/
Slashdotters don't usually publicly admit their sex lives depend on Cox.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
In some cases competition would actually be harmful, for instance, it makes no sense to have multiple lines delivering electricity or for that matter Internet service to the same household, especially when there are other unconnected places that would be much better served with a connection.
Competition isn't harmful, that's just a case of bad planning, which specifically created a lack of competition. Power lines / fiber / water pipes / etc all flow through public land. That means the people should own those (controlled by the government, and the government should build the infrastructure). The government, however, should not supply what flows through that medium. They should give access to multiple power companies to supply electricity to the grid, water companies to supply water, ISPs to supply the connections at the endpoints. The money to build / maintain those structures could come from a tax on the bill for each one of those utilities. This is perfectly fair, as only the people using it will pay for it. In addition, you get the advantage of lower barrier to entry on that market, and don't have to give anyone monopoly rights to give them an incentive to build the infrastructure.
In the end, we end up paying for the infrastructure anyway, since the government tends to give these companies a lot of money to help them build the infrastructure, along with the monopoly rights. Might as well own what we paid for.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Is everybody silly?
Usenet as a discussion forum is dead. Go elsewhere.
If you absolutely must have Usenet as a discussion forum, run your own server. The bandwidth required is next to nothing - any small dedicated server carries the power and bandwidth to run a Usenet server that can easily make it to the top1000 in the server statistics for what remains of Usenet.
If you absolutely must have Usenet as a file sharing medium, well, commercial offers for that exist.
Just trying to understand all the statements made thus far.
As a company, Cox has come to the conclusion that Usenet/Netnews access is no longer going to be provided for by them. I see this as a general business decision, whether they see it as a cost savings on internal bandwidth usage, or power/storage/maintenance usage. That is entirely up to them. You may feel differently, and you are entitled to your own opinion. If you don’t like it, there are always other options. If there aren’t any options, then make an option (Capitalism in action). They have not stated that I can find (haven't found yet, not saying doesn't exist) that due to lack of customers not knowing that it is there, we will be discontinuing this service. Cox is not the first and most likely will not be the last ISP to turn off their Usenet servers. They have been better than most in the case that they are giving everyone a warning of what is going to happen. Not just throwing the switch and dealing with the aftermath.
Another note to a few posters above is that, while yes "You" and others do not use Usenet for illegal purposes, there are those that do. So using a reference earlier that 99% of current users do not use it puts you in the 1% category. Of the 1% that do actually use it, i would be fair to say that 1 in 5 actually use it for what it was designed. The other 4 use it for porn/software/movies and the like. So in essence you are arguing that they are bad people because they are not keeping a service alive for the .2% of their user base that are using it legitimately.
They have offered 1 alternate provider, but you are not limited to that provider. If those concerned believe that it is not too hard to host a Usenet server, I ask you to create one and host it. Not getting into the argument that walk in their shoes and see what it is like. But legitimately run your own server, if something is of that much importance to you, you will be able to find a way to keep it.
Breakdown: They have decided to allocate their resources elsewhere, have given people options to look elsewhere for other ways of Usenet access. If you don’t like their decision, do your own thing, nothing prevents you from doing it.
My 2 cents.
To the internet and email?
You're paying for internet and email access. Why should they be giving you usenet access? Thats like asking why they don't provide free servers for running game servers, or vent servers.