2. That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause, but Title I and Title II are different parts of the 1934 statute passed by Congress under which the FCC claims its legal authority, and who they regulate and how they may do so.
3. Briefly under the Obama administration until they were reclassified again under the Trump administration, but I addressed it because of what you said here:
> ISPs are a common carrier and never really moderated the content of newsgroups on usenet.
Re: DNS
DNS is probably a core service. Yes there are third parties but if I had to supply my own DNS service, an Internet service provider would not be a very good Internet service provider seeing as how their core function is access to the Internet. I’d like to see how long an ISP would last without providing customers with a DNS resolver though, that could be fun.
> ISPs so far have never had separate line items for bundled services in their bill. Not for usenet, not for email, not for DNS. I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future.
Telephone, cable, home security and various streaming services they either own or have relationships with. Comcast even has an MVNO. We don’t live in a world where most ISPs are merely ISPs and a lot of them repurpose that infrastructure to provide other services. We don’t have to talk about ISPs in a vacuum.
Also remember the original context of my first comment in this chain. I was responding to this:
> I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.
I’ve re-read that a few times and wondered if I misread the spirit of this text and whether I should have replied the way I did or not, but independent of whether I have or not, please read what I wrote with the appropriate context when you respond. I wasn’t addressing whether ISPs did something, I was addressing the appeal of being billed this way vs on my credit card without the additional layer of obfuscation.
Put another way: ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing. We have a million social networks and even communities with paid memberships. When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.
There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation.