Web based Usenet

by JV Valdez

Don’t count Usenet out just yet. While doomsayers have been spelling its demise for the past decade, Usenet has proven that it is organic, capable of adapting to the needs of the times. The layman is particularly averse to the complicated language related to it—codes, protocol and the Usenet reader, to name a few. To make it appealing to the uninitiated, and to sustain its relationship with its loyal subscribers, web based Usenet came into being. Now readers can just pull up a browser and make it the Usenet browser.

In order to understand the present status of Usenet and its venture into the World Wide Web, we need to trace its nature and go more than 30 years back when the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University started it. From the phrase “User’s network”, the term Usenet came into being as the academe’s response to its communication needs, at a time when electronic communication was expensive and restricted to government agencies and the military.

From 1979 and until the birth of the Web more than a decade later, Usenet flourished and served as the main forum for communication online. It developed nine hierarchies, each with its own topical category or what is commonly referred to as newsgroup. Eight of these hierarchies employ their respective guidelines, while one operates more freely.

These hierarchies are the following:

comp - computer science discussions

humanities - arts, literature, philosophy discussions

misc - miscellaneous topics

news - news discussions

rec - entertainment, recreation, music, movies discussion

sci - science subjects

soc - sociological topics

talk - controversial discussion on religion, politics

alt - alternative, popular subjects

The first hierarchy is usually referred to as the “Big 8” while the last one, alternative, is less organized but considered as the biggest and most popular. This is primarily because the alt hierarchy is a repository of countless programs, images, mp3s and videos--technically referred to as binaries--many of them pornographic in nature. Despite its widespread use in the 1980s and for the better part of the 1990s, Usenet has not really taken off the ground to penetrate the mainstream Internet audience.

For one, a user needs to utilize a special client program, a reader software that connects to a news server. Discussions on newsgroups are decoded by a reader which needs to be set up

and configured to a newsgroup server. Clients integrated into email clients soon proliferated to draw more Usenet readers and for ease of use, but many of these incorporated clients had quirks and proved to be even cumbersome with incorrect protocols and standards. Usenet traditionalists did not like this merger and stuck with standalone clients.

Then the Web was born, with its spanking new interface and colorful graphics, and the ever-important marketing funds. Because Usenet was confined to a small niche of the Internet population, there was not much money invested into it. As the 2000s rolled by, ISPs discontinued this service one by one because of the decrease in the number of actual readers arising from stiff contest posed by forums and blogs, and an increasing number of Usenet traffic dedicated to spam and file-sharing. Some groups have even remained stagnant for a considerable length of time.

The issue of piracy and child pornography came into the picture, as the proportion of Usenet bandwidth is eaten up a great deal by these binary types—illegal software and music, as well as x-rated images catering to pedophilia. Many ISPs fed into this issue; they decided to cease Usenet hosting all along to evade legal and political issues. A high crusade against child pornography was initiated by New York State Attorney Andrew Cuomo, and this scared off many ISPs, including the big wigs Time Warner, Sprint and Verizon, each reacting on various levels, from blocking several hierarchies to stopping the service completely. However, a lot of Usenet advocates criticized this step because cutting off Usenet was not a moral decision for the ISPs, they say, but an economic one.

Severing Usenet from the general population and its loyal readers is not totally a means to an end. As it is grouped into several hierarchies, an alt.binaries newsgroup that contains child pornography is but one of the many topics discussed on Usenet. If political will is strengthened to maim Usenet completely, then a significant percentage of its readers—those who engage in useful and legal discussions—will be left in the dark. There are people who relied on newsgroups for their chemistry classes back in college, a reflection of many Usenet enthusiasts who depend on newsgroups for vital information.

While economics dictates its survival, the migration from a server and ISP-based format into web based Usenet has guaranteed its continued existence, albeit with pay services across many sites. Thus a free Usenet is necessary as deemed by some adherents in order to attract readers from a shrinking population of users who now access it through this new Usenet browser. A free Usenet service is the greatest incentive to guarantee its propagation.

Usenet was the foremost Internet community and this was where many terms popular today came into existence, such as FAQs and spam. Tim Berners-Lee announced the start of the World Wide Web here. This gives us all the more reason to continue this service with web based Usenet.