The aging but still very popular Usenet is finding itself to be less and less desired at the ISP end, with them slowly dropping support for the system. Just recently, Comcast, one of the world’s biggest ISPs has pulled the plug on their Usenet newsgroup service. This follows up changes they made earlier to restrict bandwidth consumption on newsgroups.

Advocates of newsgroups claim that ISPs shutting them down is a blow to privacy and anonymous discussion, among other things. Comcast customers can of course still use other newsgroup services, only their local servers have disappeared. AOL was one of the first big providers to offer Usenet access, and also one of the first to shut their servers down, in 2005.