I think he's assuming that #rpgnet = http://www.RPG.net [...] As I understand it, the places are only connected in name. The goals, administration, and everything else are quite different. Folk banned from RPG.net are not banned from the channel, and many have spent quite a bit of time there in the past.
Actually, the administration has overlap. Dan Davenport is the owner of #rpgnet, has been for years, and in the last year or two was made a moderator of rpg.net. However, I know of no instances where being banned in one place has led to a ban in the other, nor do I know of any instance where Dan did an unfair banning in either place.
The difficulty is, from what I've seen, not in their use of proscriptive (banning) powers, but in their use of prescriptive powers. rpg talk was given little or no encouragement, and frequent discouragement; talk of other stuff was strongly encouraged. There was a cliqueishness which caused a "circle the wagons" mentality at times, and caused them to view negatively harmless or neutral things.
For example, because religious, political, and foul-language talk wasn't allowed in #rpgnet, I created #tangency and ran it for a couple of years, as a sort of safety-valve. So when someone got heated, or pissed off with a mod, or strayed into the banned topics, I'd say, "you should take it to #tangency." Sometimes - but not always - this would get a negative response from the mods or regular channel members. "You're trying to steal our members for your dead chan!" That kind of response is just a cliqueish thing, it's natural and human, happens everywhere (never got that response from Dan, by the way). We get it here, for example - when therpgsite was down, people advertised their own forums and got a hostile response from some of the more cliqueishly-inclined therpgsite members.
So basically #rpgnet is just a cliquey little channel, which is only incidentally about rpgs. Some of the clique members are more hostile than others, some are more open and friendly. But in the end it's a clique, and not much about rpgs - not the last times I've visited it, anyway. Why else would they ban people who criticise them somewhere else, or register on a forum just to have a go at the guy? That's classic clique stuff.
But as Dan Davenport says, it's easy to start your own channel, even easier than starting a forum! The hard part is promoting it, keeping the membership up, and so on. That's why I ditched #therpgsite - it was effort I could be spending on something else, like planning for my game sessions. I was also a bit uncomfortable with the hostility between chans, with people going from one chan to the other to bitch. That's like therpgsite/rpg.net rivalries, I don't like it much - both places have value. It's just that #rpgnet's value does not like in talking about rpgs. It's basically Tangency Open rpg.net, but without the religion and politics and profanity. Well, last I saw either of those, anyway.
Just start your own chan, easy to do.