I don't want my hosting company to dictate what I can do and what I can't do. I don't spam, but I won't hold my moral standard to everyone else.

Your hosting company is free to allow all the spam they want to leave their network and every other ISP on the planet is free to drop all traffic from your irresponsible hosting company's IP space. freedom sure is nice.

I and I alone is responsible for my act. It is a slippery downward slope once you start outsourcing responsibility.

When your act is choosing and giving money to a host that supports and enables spammers and attackers yes, your are responsible for that. Blacklists can be outsourced, but many ISPs maintain their own internal blacklists as well. ISPs can also subscribe to a 3rd party blacklist, but still whitelist specific blacklisted IPs they know aren't going to cause them problems. There are plenty of blacklists that ISPs choose not to use because they block too much to be useful. ISPs can also use blacklists not to block senders, but to greylist them or give them higher levels of scrutiny before deciding what do accept or block.

In the end, even with 3rd party blacklists networks still maintain control over what incoming traffic/mail they block or allow.

You missed my point. I don't want my network to censor traffic. It is email traffic today, it could be web traffic tomorrow. If this trend holds, we would all live in walled gardens, and cede our power to the gate keepers.

Preventing spammers and hackers from using your network isn't censorship though. If you want people to let you into their homes, you have to make sure you don't keep lighting fires and smashing up their furniture.

Internet censorship is a real issue, but blocking hackers and spammers are not an example of internet censorship gone wrong. ISPs black spam over email. They block malicious web traffic too. Every network gets to decide what to accept or reject. It's about as fair a system as you could ask for.

> If you want people to let you into their homes, you have to make sure you don't keep lighting fires and smashing up their furniture.

You analogy is flawed. In the case of IP blacklisting, it is an intermediary preventing legitimate email delivery on shaky ground. My correspondent want the mail; yet she never got to see it. This is censorship.

> it is an intermediary preventing legitimate email delivery on shaky ground.

The 3rd party hosting the blacklist is an intermediary, but the network operator on the receiving end isn't. They still have total control over what lists to subscribe to, how they'll be used, and what to block or allow. That's not censorship. As a network operator it is there right to block or accept whatever traffic they want. If you, as a customer/end user don't like how they run their network you're free to operate your own or choose to give your money to someone else.

So you think as long as the user can choose to leave, the platform is no an intermediary. I strongly disagree. Even if the user theoretically can choose, we have to consider the asymmetric information, high switching cost, and monopoly power that are so prevalent nowadays. I choose not to use the big email providers, but most people can't do the same.

> So you think as long as the user can choose to leave, the platform is no an intermediary. I strongly disagree. Even if the user theoretically can choose, we have to consider the asymmetric information, high switching cost, and monopoly power that are so prevalent nowadays.

Some platforms rise to that level I think. Youtube is one example. Email doesn't really have that problem. Anyone can install an email server, and there are a huge amount of options (many of them "free") for those who don't want to run their own mail servers. Email is still a competitive space with different companies offering specialized services targeting people who want privacy, low cost, mass mailing capability, tracking features, etc. Email itself has a ton of competing communication protocols. There are plenty of folks who prefer to communicate over chat or by text. You can even keep an old email address and forward anything sent there to another one or use a separate email address for sending, but get replies at your old address. Switching email addresses is about as easy as it gets.