The point isn't that they are required to be custodians of Usenet, it's that they volunteered to become a custodian, and then dropped the ball on that function in the most noxious way possible.
Tying it back to the article, you can't trust a company to do something in the public interest, or maintain that work in perpetuity unless you pay them.
Usenet is a limited example, a more impactful one would be Google locking down access to Maps, including all of the metadata contributed by the public. There's nothing stopping them from doing that.
Tying it back to the article, you can't trust a company to do something in the public interest, or maintain that work in perpetuity unless you pay them.
Usenet is a limited example, a more impactful one would be Google locking down access to Maps, including all of the metadata contributed by the public. There's nothing stopping them from doing that.