But there's terrible irony in the bandwidth argument. The inside-out architecture of the Usenet, whereby tens of thousands of newsgroups replicate to tens of thousands of servers every day, is a far more egregious abuse of bandwidth. Discussion data no longer needs to propagate around the world by way of replication. It's 1997, not 1977. News servers, like Web servers, are now directly accessible from all points on the Internet.
News clients can hop instantly from server to server, just as Web clients can.
News servers, like Web servers, can house deep, richly structured, densely interwoven, searchable collections of documents. This scenario may or may not ultimately prevail on the Usenet. Either way, you can create an alternative public or private version of the Usenet using a stand-alone news server. When I started doing this 18 months ago, I had to climb the admittedly steep learning curve associated with INND, the server app that powers most of the Usenet. Today it's much easier.