said by jbob:Every ISP I have ever had offered NNTP as part of the package.
When I started with Astragate, a dial-up ISP available in the S.F. Bay Area, in 1999, they did not offer NNTP service until a couple of months after we signed up.
NNTP service has a cost to carry it, and I suspect most ISPs offered a very small budget to maintain it. Which is why most ISP news service was crappy. SBC took over Prodigy, and ran the old Prodigy (excellent) news service into the ground. Guess which company was more profitable
before the takeover? SBC took over AT&T (Worldnet Service), and is running the old AT&T (Worldnet Service, excellent) news service into the ground. Guess which company was more profitable
before the takeover? SBC started calling themselves, "AT&T", after taking over AT&T. SBC never had good, or even just "decent", NNTP service. And they just killed all of 'alt.binaries.*' last July.
AOL stopped carrying NNTP service years ago, yet just last June, or so, they acceded to Mario Cuomo's demands. Why? Because if they did not, he'd take them to court to force them to stop doing what they had long not been doing. Companies are in business for profit, not principle. While Cuomo is wrong, in principle, it would cost money to prove it in court; a cost which would deprecate profit. So AOL chose "profit" over "principle", and agreed to join Cuomo in announcing that they would no longer do that which they had already stopped doing years ago. And AT&T, rather than facing the court costs of fighting Cuomo, also announced that they were joining his "initiative". And Comcast...
None of the ISPs were making money off of NNTP service. They weren't losing money, but they weren't making any, either.
Do you know what happened to the free NNTP services? They were "labors of love", run by people who had a little extra money. When the world beat paths to their servers, they couldn't cover the costs of the bandwidth, and the server capacity; they folded.
And what happened to Supernews? They were a premium NNTP provider, but they ultimately couldn't cover their cost of operation, and were bought by Giganews. The premium services still standing have to cover their costs of operation, or they will go under. That is just the nature of private enterprise.
Robert Anson Heinlein understood that, when he coined the "TANSTAAFL" acronym in
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".