Freeze my ass for the next 15 years

He’s playing a part.

ISPs used to provide usenet access for free back in the day.

It’s a distributed federated system in which content is exchanged between different news servers. Clients connect to particular news server which has to be hosted somewhere (and have a lot of storage space) which isn’t free to operate.

Torrents forgo all that and have clients directly connect to one another.

Usenet really wasn’t designed for file sharing. It’s a message board system, but you can easily encode binary data as ASCII text and wham bam now you’re sharing media.

Video