
The New Law That Killed Craigslist’s Personals Could End the Web as We’ve Known - guiambros
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-new-law-that-killed-craigslists-personals-could-end-the-web-as-weve-known-it
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narrator
The whole Web showed up for net neutrality and this bill was completely
ignored until they took down Craigslist personals. What the hell happened?

~~~
adventured
It's because most of the left shuts down critical thinking if you say a bill
is for ending sex trafficking. It ends their ability to think rationally or
challenge the rest of it. It's the reason politicians use the: "it's for the
children," bullshit - it ends debate & challenges. That same contingent,
mostly the left, were the ones protesting ending net neutrality.

You had the NY Times and Washington Post both supporting the Cloud Act as a
good idea, by pushing pro opinion pieces.

~~~
behindmyscreen
Just like the right goes crazy when using "but muh freedom", or "they want to
take your guns".

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
Don’t get them started!

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hoodoof
Governments value higher control and tighter laws over anything else. There
will be more.

~~~
thriftwy
We should go for decentralized platforms that are harder to control. We should
go for local. One Facebook is easier to shut down than 10.000 chat rooms.

~~~
ben_w
Are they? A chat room with 1/10,000th the income of Facebook is “only” $1.5
million profit per year. Is that enough to avoid being made an example of? And
would the first set a precedent for the rest?

~~~
rocqua
There could be a loose collective here that decides to defend against these
sorts of things collectively, whilst still allowing independent operation.

Heck, that isn't very different from the concept of insurance.

~~~
ben_w
I was thinking about insurance as I wrote my previous comment. All it takes is
one that doesn’t have it when the risk is a new precedent. Government would
just go after them. (And that’s assuming the government doesn’t just pass a
new law, which is non-zero risk, but which I will overlook for now because
sometimes one bit of a government will do things against the interests of
another bit, such as a recent case in the UK where a specialist was recruited
for the NHS and kicked out by the Home Office).

~~~
thriftwy
Why doesn't "government" go against bittorrent? Oh, I forgot, they can't!
Nevermind.

~~~
ben_w
If any government cared enough (except perhaps the American one), it could ban
the the protocol. They don’t care, and the people who do care are satisfied
with the existing options for suing copyright infringers.

TOR is much more likely to be regulated than bittorrent, given the whole point
of the latter is to remove control from governments.

~~~
thriftwy
They used to care pretty strongly. That's a fact. They also didn't do much
about it. Also a fact.

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OtterCoder
I don't understand the panic about this law. Mens rea is appropriately
considered in the law. Unless they can prove that you built your site with the
intention of facilitating sex trafficking, you still aren't on the hook for
what your users do.

And, if you become aware of sex trafficking on your website and you don't do
anything about it, you are absolutely complicit. This is hardly rocket
science, and it doesn't seem to overreach the way everyone is screaming that
it does.

~~~
jupiter90000
I could be wrong but I think mens rea can encompass acting recklessly or
acting negligently, not just acting purposely. An example of something people
have been convicted of that may fall there is involuntary manslaughter.

Edit: see also willful blindness.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness#Precedent_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness#Precedent_in_the_United_States)

 _A famous example of such a defense being denied occurred in In re Aimster
Copyright Litigation, in which the defendants argued that the file-swapping
technology was designed in such a way that they had no way of monitoring the
content of swapped files. They suggested that their inability to monitor the
activities of users meant that they could not be contributing to copyright
infringement by the users. The court held that this was willful blindness on
the defendant 's part and would not constitute a defense to a claim of
contributory infringement._

It would seem ridiculous for courts to start charging e-mail providers, for
example, as facilitating sex trafficking though, even if they must suspect
their services are used for such activity. I wonder how it will play out.

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purplezooey
I love how we can pass laws like this but nothing was done to Equifax or now,
Facebook. Seems like they are closely related problems.

~~~
kakarot
Why would we do anything to inhibit useful and compliant surveillance
companies that both inevitably serve to widen the poverty gap?

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masonic
This could be just a short-term demonstration. The ads are still there, just
inaccessible -- if you go to Renew an existing ad via your account, it appears
normal from the account side and gives no error.

A genuine ad's "hidden" URL gets rerouted to a FOSTA message. Change the ad
number, and you get a 404 instead.

~~~
makomk
Not necessarily. The backend system still has to be there in order to support
all the countries where personals are still available. It's possible they just
haven't finished disabling it in the US properly yet.

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unwind
Meta but mods: please edit the title. It's missing a word and looks sad.

~~~
kakarot
The New Law That Killed Craigslist's Personals Could End the Web, as We've
Known (For Quite Some Time).

------
veridies
I know this is likely to be an unpopular opinion here, but I'm not sure that
websites ought to scale in the way we've been building them to. One of the
biggest causes of frustration and concerns is that websites that are operated
by only a handful of people are used by millions of people, with no serious
way to seek relief if problems emerge. Think of how disastrous security
oversights have been, from companies too small to adequately compensate those
who have been wronged. Or think of how disastrous technical glitches or
mistakes can be (such as deleted Google accounts or Facebook privacy setting
glitches). Or think of how Uber seems to have rushed to reduced the human
oversight of their autonomous cars before they were ready. We are giving far
more responsibility and social power to companies than they are truly capable
of handling.

The power of computers to make transactions and interactions more efficient is
great. But I'm not sure that efficiency needs to come at the limit of our
technological capacity instead of at the limit of human attention.

~~~
ianai
You’re hinting at a deep problem with our current economic system. It really
does produce monopolies or oligopolies with far too much concentration.
History documents this functionality: the Trust Busting of the late 1800s was
a reaction to clearly concentrated markets, for instance.

The solution is clearly to produce more things closer to the demand source.
But I don’t see many examples of that.

As a crude suggestion, maybe carbon adjusted energy costs would incentive
local production with shipped-in raw materials.

~~~
watwut
Large factor is that few companise being able to give away product for free
kills competition. Gmail being free (and good) and without ads made
competition of many smaller companies impossible. Few companies being able to
operate products at loss for years makes competition impossible for smaller
players.

~~~
jakeogh
Google is dying. They bubbled themselves. Trading "free" for market share only
works for a finite time. See FB. Their pivot to skynet will only accelerate
it. If google wants to survive, they better shape up and put their awesome
software contributions front and center, remove the broken pillars, and stop
trying to weaponize their 3 letter control grid. Everyone knows they are
social engineering the search results, all the way down to their stupid
doodles. It's an open joke.

~~~
watwut
Yes, but in the meantime smaller companies can't compete. And meantime here is
over dozen years.

There is also something to be said about (looking back) astonishing naivete of
tech people who bought the whole "don't be evil" motto and who sincererly
believed that since founders are tech school graduates, they are guaranteed to
be ethical unlike those evil business majors.

~~~
jakeogh
Right on. Lets not let the problem-reaction-solution cycle fix it.

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mkempe
Now, why would Facebook's Sandberg openly support FOSTA? further, who else is
in favor of this kind of attack on the Web?

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marssaxman
The web as we knew it ended some years ago. The thing that exists now is...
well... it's nice, I suppose.

------
mudil
Ronald Reagan liked to describe the sequence of actions that government
typically takes toward private business: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps
moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."

~~~
fjsolwmv
The same Ronald Reagan who subsidized the crack cocaine and Latin America
democracy industries?

~~~
dmitrygr
I guess they must have stopped moving?

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Erlangolem
Ironically it’s just these kinds of laws which may finally create a broader
popular drive to re-decentralize. Those people looking for sex and drugs and
whatever else aren’t going to just say, “well shit, the government said no,
let’s head to church.” They’re going to look for alternatives, and
alternatives will be there for them. It won’t be glossy Java-heavy “Web 2.0”
of course, it will be Tor, Mastadon, and encrypted communications.

That’s the real strength of the internet, you cut of F a head and two more
grow back. If more stringent laws are passed, that just creates more drive for
alternatives. It’s going to be ugly, but I remember when the internet was
ugly, but worked. It won’t make people filthy rich overnight, but that’s not
the net either. People still want to hook up, buy guns and weed, and just talk
without Big Brother breathing down their neck. It will start small, and grow
fast; after all we have a few decades worth of roadmap.

People who’ve moaned about people needing to look past a handful of sites are
possibly going to get their wish. The total inability for governments to field
sustainable technical solutions to shutting down commas has not changed.

So fight.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" It won’t be glossy Java-heavy "Web 2.0" of course, it will be Tor,
Mastadon, and encrypted communications."_

The problem is that unless these alternatives are made brain-dead easy to use
securely, they won't be used by the majority, or they'll be misused.

It's the same problem as with PGP, which is too complicated and too much of a
pain for most people to use -- even for relatively computer savvy people to
bother with.

Without many people using them, they won't be very effective or appealing
alternatives.

~~~
mirimir
If they're the _only_ viable alternatives, people will adapt. And I'm sure
that usability will also improve.

But yes, the potential for privacy-compromising security failures is indeed
troubling.

~~~
ben_w
The adaptation can just as easily be sour grapes (“I can’t get it therefore it
is undesirable”) as anything else. People don’t always yearn for freedom, just
as they don’t always yearn for a strong leader to take control.

------
yters
Censorship of the internet is inevitable, and traffic that cannot be censored
will be dropped.

~~~
golemotron
It's a positive. We'll re-discover the real world.

