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> they were simply borne by your ISP

Well, not necessarily your ISP. I've never had an ISP that supplied Usenet feeds. But yes, the cost was borne by somebody that wasn't you. (Probably -- if you didn't have access to someone else's Usenet feeds, there were services that would provide one to you for a fee.)

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By univs and research labs too, among others. Probably corps too.

ISPs in the 1990s often provided Usenet newsgroups. I had EarthLink dialup and had Usenet groups

They did up till around 2010 IIRC. The smaller ISPs had their own feeds, but eventually outsourced them. I remember the Path header containing the server name of the ISPs own NNTP server, but later it changed to supernews.

ISPs also provided email accounts and I believe some provided a server directory for you to host your own website.

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