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I don't see how Google should have any responsibility wrt. Usenet.

Google is not the only party having Usenet archives. They are not even in any way special. They aren't the "official" archives, just as Deja wasn't.

If you're really interested in getting your hands on Usenet archives, going way back to the Ice Age, there are plenty of ways to do so.

Especially with the huge Hamster community (http://www.tglsoft.de/freeware_hamster.html), who are archiving almost fanatically, you should be able to get virtually everything you'd want just by asking nicely.

Other parties who certainly have archives are all the major news servers.

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The point isn't that they are required to be custodians of Usenet, it's that they volunteered to become a custodian, and then dropped the ball on that function in the most noxious way possible.

Tying it back to the article, you can't trust a company to do something in the public interest, or maintain that work in perpetuity unless you pay them.

Usenet is a limited example, a more impactful one would be Google locking down access to Maps, including all of the metadata contributed by the public. There's nothing stopping them from doing that.

> Especially with the huge Hamster community (http://www.tglsoft.de/freeware_hamster.html), who are archiving almost fanatically, you should be able to get virtually everything you'd want just by asking nicely.

What is the Hamster community? It sounds interesting. The link points to some software that could be used to help archive, but doesn't say much more (at least browsing around the Google translation of it).

Hamster is a local news and mail server for Win32.

It's comparable to sn on Linux: it acts as a reader, not as a "real news server" (IHAVE/SENDME).

So people could use it with their regular Usenet account on a dialup PC.

And since it's scriptable (alas, in some own script language), people extended it in lots of ways.

Thanks. How does "archiving almost fanatically" fit in with that? Or is this archiving culture just coincidental?

Coincidental. I haven't kept my archives, even though at one point I had sucked postings for several nights (all of de.*, and the Big8, I think).

But others kept their "purple data" religiously.

A simple torrent per decade would be nice.