Just last night, one of the largest Usenet Indexing websites, NZBMatrix, announced its closure. This announcement follows not too long after blocked indexing site, Newzbin, also announced its closure.
Unlike Newzbin, however, NZBMatrix was not amidst a battlefield of legal cannon-fire and instead found that compliance to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and the aggressive approach of the US government to encourage payment providers to not accept fees from indexing sites took away the viability of the service.
Ironically, the high fees involved in enacting and enforcing DMCA take-down requests could not be obtained as funding sources were cut-off as payment providers turned-down the site. This was of particular concern to NZBMatrix, as the site goes one-step beyond and works to categorise content beyond the standard structure for merely scanning the Usenet. The ongoing running costs were also an issue for site owners given the fragile cash flow.
Perhaps, however, at the root of the decision to close, was the realisation that Usenet providers themselves, those that host content, had begun to actively enforce the DMCA, with Indexing sites often finding that indexed content no-longer existed with the providers.
This realisation has thrown into question the future of Usenet as a service. There are many arguments for and against content take-downs and the way hosting and indexing sites should function, however, the reality is that right now, many Usenet providers are offering-up a service different to the one offered several years ago. This is bound to cause a change in the service's user-base and perhaps trigger a search for the next 'big thing' in file-sharing.
It'll be interesting to see if this move accelerates the adoption of emerging services, based around distributed content and anonymisation, or, if the general public will remain content with the status quo.
