In Germany basically all ISPs never provided the binary groups, so piracy was never an issue. There also was no conspiracy to shut down the servers because of that.
I was active in the German Usenet back then and still remember that between around 2001 and 2005 the spammers and trolls took over and destoyed one group after another until they were completely unusable. I also mostly quit around maybe 2005.
So I highly doubt that Usenet would have continued to work if ISPs had just continued support it. Usenet only worked as long as everyboy was nice to each other, it would never work today without much better moderation protocols and tools.
And yet the German groups started a slow but steady decline after their peak in 2001: http://usenet.dex.de/de.ALL.html
I was active in the German Usenet back then and still remember that between around 2001 and 2005 the spammers and trolls took over and destoyed one group after another until they were completely unusable. I also mostly quit around maybe 2005.
So I highly doubt that Usenet would have continued to work if ISPs had just continued support it. Usenet only worked as long as everyboy was nice to each other, it would never work today without much better moderation protocols and tools.