USENET?

[Wojciech Puchar]

>> at least in Poland there are free. and for my clients i have nntpcache'd
>> news from Gda?sk University.
>
> Actually, in most parts of the world, news are still freely available
> with many ISPs (you may have to ask them explicitly), except for
> alt.binaries.* which are quite bandwidth intensive.

i'm connected to university network (commercially, not as a student ;), i 
have all their service included in price. alt.binaries.* too, don't know 
if all of them as i don't use it.

>
> Your typical small ISP would rather save the bandwidth it takes to
> transfer all articles, esp. if only a fraction of them are accessed

nntpcache is exactly for this. it's like squid, just for nntp

it's worth even with 1 nntp user, and it takes 5 minutes to configure.