Your repeated misrepresentation of the use of blacklists by one party in a prospective SMTP transaction as vigilantism is as offensive as it it is a familiar complaint of senders of unwanted mail, including spammers and kooks.
I'm not talking about any party to the real end-to-end email transaction. I'm talking about intermediaries. I have no problem at all with user-controlled filters that do whatever they want. It's when an ISP starts doing these things on behalf of a user who doesn't understand or want them that the problems arise.
Regardless of what governments or anyone else might do about spam, and regardless of whether you and anyone else other than the targets of your mail consider it spam, your implicit claim to a right to send is wrong and scarier than any sort of Internet vigilante-style punishment.
I don't claim any such right to send. In fact, I agree with you about your right to block. But that right belongs to the you as the recipient of the communication, not to a third party intermediary that is not acting with the explicit approval of the recipient. Just as you have the right to choose only "opt in" email, I have the right to choose "opt out" email blocking. We need to preserve BOTH of those rights. Eliminating the latter right is simply not the best way to fix the problems with the former right.
Your right to send mail stops at the border routers of your ISP.
Bzzt. Not in most Western countries it doesn't. In telephony, equal access regulations have long ensured that telephone companies are required to interconnect their systems and NOT make third party decisions to block calls. But that doesn't stop you personally from using caller-id information to filter my calls, or even from buying a box that subscribes to a private blacklisting service. It's your decision, not your ISP's.
Whether your mail gets any farther depends entirely on the sufferance, whim, and caprice of others.
Read your history. This is more or less what the 19th century phone companies argued, and it's what governmental regulation of communication in a democracy is *for*. The ISP's like to claim "common carrier" status when it's in their interest, but they should bear the same responsibilities as well.
If prospective targets of your mail reject it because your IP address is divisible by 91, that is entirely fair, appropriate, and not for anyone but the owners of your targeted mailboxes to judge.
That is certainly one opinion, but the history of telecommunications policy in the US and elsewhere is based on a rather different opinion.
Customers of ISPs that want to receive your mail but can't for any reason, whether the use blacklists, the prime factors of your IP address, or standard incompetence, have and should have only one recourse, changing mail providers.
This is precisely where your argument falls apart: ISP's are consolidating and becoming more and more like common carriers. Fork example, at my home in a modern American city, I have precisely two reasonably priced options if I want broadband: Cable and DSL. Ultimately it is becoming a duopoly, and while that's better than a monopoly, it just doesn't leave enough options for a fully laissez-faire position to be realistic.
Next you'll be telling me that if you telephone me, I can't hang up on you. not that I would, but I reserve the right.
You have that right, and also the right not to answer the phone when my name comes up on caller-id. But your phone company doesn't have the right to make the decision, on your behalf and without your consent, to not cause your phone to ring. And no, acceptable use policies aren't an adequate answer because the decreasing number of consumer-level alternatives means I'm likely to be stuck with a AUP that I find unacceptable.
I don't see any difference between this situation and the situation where, say, China uses its governmental/monopolistic powers to block all email from Taiwan. It's an abridgement of a fundamental human right to communicate, which I think trumps the rights of monopolistic ISP's to cut their spam-related expenses. -- Nathaniel