28 Jan
2023
28 Jan
'23
9:24 p.m.
[moved to COFF]
On Sat, Jan 28, 2023 at 4:16 AM Andy Kosela <akosela(a)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