They also provided shell accounts and webhosting. It had nothing to do with being a telecom provider. They stopped providing those services because third party services grew more popular and ISPs were happy to pocket the money they were spending to provide and support those services (our bills only went up even as ISPs offered less and less)

Yeah and back in those times where you hopped on your phone line to dial to your ISPs modem to access the services they host I'd completely agree they were information services providers which happened to maybe offer this new fangled "web" thing you might have heard of on the news. People signed up for those ISPs because of the information services the ISPs provided.

Now people sign up for their ISPs because they offered the better price/throughput/stability math, or often they were the only one reasonably available. Practically nobody signs up because one provider has better email or better newsgroups.

What are you even saying? These were not signifiers of “telecom providers”. They were elements of competition amongst ISPs. In what world was Usenet and web hosting part of historical telecom offerings?