Christian> I would much rather receive and delete another
annoying
Christian> proposition to get rich quick or see lurid pictures than
tolerate
Christian> any form of censorship.
As has been pointed out, the non-member messages can be moderated. It
takes
about one second to look at a message and tell whether it is
unsolicited
commercial or not. So the downside is that the non-member message
may
be
delayed for a bit until the moderator gets to it.
This is one of many possible implementations. As Keith pointed out, it
is much better than any form of automated action, such as closed
membership list. The downside is that it is a heavy work on the single
"censor"; there are indeed ways to spread the load to multiple editors.
I wouldn't call that
censorship. (I think one has to be very privileged indeed to
confuse
a small inconvenience with censorship.)
All form of filtering have the potential to drift into censorship. We
have seen it with the anti-porn web site filters, and we are indeed
seeing accusation of censorship floated against the RBL. For the IETF,
we must go to extreme to ensure openness and remove any hint of possible
censorship.
-- Christian Huitema