On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:04:01 GMT, Larry Dighera wrote in :

I can see how they are caught between a rock and a hard place.

I can't. How does GoogleGroups situation differ from other Usenet
gateways?

[The following is based on guesses and surmises. I have
no inside information whatsoever about Google's actual
business plan.]

Seems to me that Google is providing services that are free to
end-users by selling other services to customers.

One of the services they provide is archiving Usenet--the
whole shooting match. It's a pretty amazing effort.

They can limit costs by limiting the processing of the data.
Putting people on duty to sort out what is and is not spam
diminishes their profits. Their profits are what allow them
to do the archiving and provide it free to end users.

So they could make a better archive if they were willing to
spend money on it--but spending money on it might make it
impossible to provide free access to the archive.

Another free service that they offer is gmail. They want
people to trust that they are not censoring their gmail
accounts. If they are too aggressive in closing accounts,
they may lose whatever the gmail business is worth to them.

Enforcing their stated policies concerning the posting of articles to
Usenet doesn't seem to be too big a problem for most ISPs, premium
Usenet providers, and web-based gateways. Why shouldn't it be
expected of GoogleGroups too?

I expect more from a service I pay for. One of the nice things
Supernews does is filter aggressively. It's amazing how much
stuff they clean up compared to other news servers I have used
(Google included). I appreciate that filtering, but I can see
why other news servers take a different approach. Astraweb
($10 for 25 GB) advertises itself as "Complete, uncensored
Usenet." Google seems to be located down at that end of
the spectrum.

Marty

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