You had sent me this email privately, and I had privately responded. I already said that I was going to stop talking about this on the list, so please stop trying to drag the list back into it.

Jeffrey.

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:

They were still providing the service, and incurring the cost of doing so. Presumably, they passed that cost onto the customers.

Now they are removing the service, which saves them the cost of maintaining it. Why shouldn't that savings be passed on?

--- On Wed, 7/9/08, Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:

On Wednesday 09 July 2008, Jeffrey Watts wrote:

...

Well, to be honest nobody uses USENET News. "Nobody" meaning an insignificant percentage of users. I bet 99% of the folks using the Internet have never even heard of it.

...

I don't think they should give a discount for a service that nobody was using, but others may disagree.

They were still providing the service, and incurring the cost of doing so. Presumably, they passed that cost onto the customers.

Now they are removing the service, which saves them the cost of maintaining it. Why shouldn't that savings be passed on?

This is true Jeffrey. As you have been entirely too quick to point out, "things cost money", and in particular you have stated that NetNews costs ISPs quite a lot of money to provide, an expense which presumably raised the user fee quite a bit.

TWC shut off NetNews service, and yet billed fees remain the same. From this we can conclude that you are mistaken in your cost estimate for a NetNews server, because TWC's example shows that it really costs very little time and money for an ISP to provide a NetNews server. Cutting the "expense" of a NetNews server produces so little effect on the books that any price decrease would be insignificant.