As other commenters have pointed out Usenet was a serious of collaborating servers each independently owned & run so there was nothign to 'acquire'. What happened, from memory, was that a sysop made a backup of his Usenet feed and Google got that tape. My GoogleFu is to weak to find a link to the story.

I ran the Newzbin Usenet search engine so it's a topic of some nostalgia for me.