Some "support techs"! They could just pick up any guide to the Internet and it will mention newsgroups...

Interesting that someone mentioned Fios discontinuing newsgroups a few weeks ago. I wonder if this might be evidence of anticompetitive collusion, with coordinated phasing out of services so consumers have nowhere to turn.

In any case, I took the advice of one of the people in this thread and got newsgroups for a few dollars a month, like two or three. That satisfies me for now, though I expect future problems on this issue. As I read somewhere, the big ISPs are now considering monthly limits on how many gigs you can download -- and they want to limit users in a month to what in Japan is the limit for one day (I think it is several gigs).