[moved to COFF]

On Sat, Jan 28, 2023 at 4:16 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com> wrote:

> Great initiative and idea! While I am personally not interested in reading
> USENET that much nowadays, the concept of providing free, public access to
> classic Internet services (public USENET, FTP, IRC, finger, etc.) gets all
> my praise. What happened to free, public services these days?


First off, what is stopping you from providing free, public access to those
services?

I don't know where you are, but I have orders of magnitude more access to
freely available content and services than I ever did in the heyday of
Usenet, etc.  And for most of it, one doesn't have to be highly technical
to use it.


> Everything appears to to be subscriber pay-as-you-go based. The
> commercialization killed the free spirit of Internet we all loved in the
> 90s.
>

"Free" was never really true, as it required massive subsidies of
equipment, power, bandwidth and employee time, usually w/o the direct
knowledge or consent of the entities paying for it.

It reminds me of the lemonade stands I'd occasionally run as a kid, which
were "profitable" to me because mom and dad, with their knowledge and
consent, let me pretend that the costs were $0.
-- 
 Nevin ":-)" Liber  <mailto:nevin@eviloverlord.com>  +1-847-691-1404