10 Sep
2017
10 Sep
'17
4:17 p.m.
Well Bill, what has happened is that USENET has
condensed into
a few central sites exchanging the articles, and accepting subscriptions
from people who still want to read/post to the newsgroups. It's the
distributed model that's died.
But that is just the "story of the internet". It has happened to (almost)
all services on internet. Even e-mail, traditionally a very distributed
service, is now mostly offered by a few central sites like gmail.com and
outlook.com/hotmail.com.
Sure, in implementation those central sites still often are distributed
(being hosted in many different datacenters on many servers all serving the
same domain name), but it no longer is the big peer-to-peer network that
it once was. This also explains the slow take-off of IPv6: there is rarely
a need anymore for a different address for everyone.
Rob