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The original comment was a remark on Usenet newsgroup message filtering. Usenet had a degree of decentralization, a single news server couldn't control the entire network. If the message is filtered at a particular path by a server, at least some other nodes would still receive their own copies via an alternative path, which may then propagate the messages further downstream.

Today's highly-centralized server-client Web architecture does not have this property. Some P2P protocols are closer to the spirit of this quote.

Conclusion: architecture of "the Net" matters a lot (the original quote didn't use the term "Internet").