Anyone who claims fees are the only filter that works please tell me how this is wrong.
"Why not let the fee market manage data storage?
The fee market is designed to prioritize transactions based on economic urgency.
However, the market for data storage on the blockchain is a completely different market from the market for payments, with completely different incentives.
Specifically, the fee for a monetary transaction incentivizes a miner to include the transaction in a block, representing a one-time transfer of monetary value, i.e., a payment. The miner thus provides the one-time service of securing a payment, for a one-time fee.
Once the payment is secured, the payor does not receive any additional benefit from the Bitcoin network, besides the integrity of Bitcoin's transaction history (a service to which all node operators are happy to contribute, because Bitcoin would not function as money otherwise).
Conversely, the fee for a data storage transaction still goes only to the miner who includes the data in a block, but the burden of storing the data falls on all node operators, who never received even a part of the fee, yet are forced to continue downloading, storing, and serving the data forever.
In this case, the miner accepts a one-time fee, and in exchange, the priceless service of highly-available, uncensorable data storage is provided in perpetuity for free by node operators.
The problem becomes even worse when the data is objectionable to node operators, as this represents an even larger, unexpected cost for them."
This is an excerpt from the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork.