Wei Dai allegedly said:

I've stayed out of the debate about list moderation so far, but a recent post from tmcghan@gill-simpson.com reminds me of something I've been thinking about. An interesting way to look at what happened is that John Gilmore owns the name "cypherpunks@toad.com" and has chosen to exercise that ownership. Even though those of us who disagree with the way he has done so are free to leave and set up our own mailing list, it is costly to do so, and the problem of central name ownership remains. List subscribers have made investments that are specific to the name "cypherpunks@toad.com", and most of the cost of switching to a new list is in the new investments they would have to (re)make. The fact is that a promise of no censorship is not enough incentive for us to do so.

I suspect that the hierarchical nature of name ownership on the Internet today will be an important technological barrier for the establishment of truly anarchic virtual communities. Unless this problem is solved, the closest we'll come is pseudo-anarchies that exist with the tolerance of beneficent dictators.

While the name hierarchy may have some effect similar to what you suggest, I think the real issue is more likely economic hierarchy -- toad.com is a name of some value, true, but toad.com is also a T1 connection and some compute power that many people simply can't afford. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: 5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E 87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F