Can anyone claim that it benefited customers when Highwinds bought up many of the formerly-independent newsgroup providers such as Easynews, Newshosting, UsenetServer, Eweka? It indeed seems to have benefited copyright owners, who can get a movie or show taken down across many different NSPs with a single filing.
I think that one reason Highwinds is disliked is the same reason that big corporations like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Symantec are resented by a lot of people.
They're big and monopoly-seeking, they buy out their competition, and then often run those companies into the ground. Being big also means bureaucratic.
Case in point: Easynews. This service once had an extremely loyal following, with quite a few people who had been customers for many years. A couple of years after Highwinds bought Easynews, the service went through a period of serious problems that rendered easynews virtually unusable for 6 months or more. Most of the original employees had left, and soon most of the customers would leave too, fed up with being strung along with empty promises month after month. Their discussion board, which had been up for a dozen years, was closed down (to public view) after it became a giant bitch-fest.
Newshosting has also apparently lost customers, as its ranking on top1000.org is today far below its level of 5 years ago, before Highwinds bought it, when it ranked near the top. A few months ago Newshosting announced that they would discontinue (or was it raise the price of?) their $15/mo unlimited plan, only to soon reverse that decision after a groundswell of complaints.
Highwinds was gobbling up usenet companies left and right during 2005 - 2006 (and even had the highest retention of any provider for a short time in late-2006) but they've since switched gears and they're now concentrating on branching out into the content delivery network (CDN) business.
see http://www.prnewswire.com/news-relea...-98015544.html
It's interesting that while Astraweb (which started out as a web-hosting company) has dropped it's other businesses that are not strictly NNTP-related, in order to concentrate on running its usenet service, Highwinds (which started out writing NNTP server software) has lately gone in the exact opposite direction - away from the usenet business. The fact that a big company like Highwinds, with its immense resources, has chosen to drop out of the "retention war" also says something about Highwinds goals.
Just my opinion, but I think that Highwinds sees "the writing on the wall" and is following the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy. They undoubtedly know that due to copyright issues usenet is on a path destined to be a victim of its own success, and that's why they're hedging their bets by buying up more "mainstream" (i.e., Hollywood-approved) companies.
Highwinds once-dominant position in the usenet provider business appears to have been eroding in recent years. Companies such as Newshosting, UsenetServer, and Easynews seem to have a smaller footprint in the overall industry than they did when Highwinds bought them years ago, while companies such as Astraweb and Readnews have a larger footprint. Independent usenet resellers that flocked to Highwinds in 2005-2006 are reversing course these days. Blocknews/UsenetNow dumped Highwinds a year ago, as did Ngroups/Usenet-News a few months ago. If other resellers such as Newsdemon/Thundernews follow suit, this could spell the beginning of the end for Highwinds as a dominant usenet provider.
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