Remember the Communication Decency Act I and II from the 90s? Or the Clipper Chip? Back then it was child porn online and the like which justified web publishing regulation.
This time it's sex trafficking as the excuse.
It seems whenever it's time to try internet regulation again, dip deep into the jar of sex related justifications.
The rationale is simple: opposing this makes you a defender of pedoporn or of sex trafficking. Fortunately serious NPOs have protested being used as excuses for inefficient regulations.
I wish we made a constitutional amendment to protect online freedoms. Every two years there is a new attack on those, it gets tiring.
Are you suggesting we should tell the people who are attacking online freedoms to make an amendment to protect them? Who do you think would get to be in charge of writing and passing such an amendment?
Seems to me like a relative of a fallacious appeal to emotion. It's got some 'ick factor' (for the many puritans, lowercase 'P,' out there) to it which probably limits its spread. Sex trafficking seems to be an almost universal taboo, so, who can be against that? Good on the EFF for trying.
The US Government has been trying to get here, to this regulatory point, for two decades. They're going to get what they're after.
The barriers to entry for building online will go up dramatically, as they have in every industry in the US over time. People mistakenly think the US is a Capitalist nation, with few economic regulations, when in fact the opposite is true, the US economy is very regulated. That borderline psychotic power addiction that emanates out of Washington DC, has its sights set squarely on the Internet as its next conquest. Why? It threatens their conventions - their understanding of how things do or should work - when it comes to political power and what they've always known. This latest election turned most of them inside out and they'll do anything to bring the Internet to heel if that helps to return their idea of political normalcy. The $100,000 Facebook-Russia media performance going on right now is all about that, finding an angle to launch from to begin heavily regulating politics online. SESTA is similarly about using a convenient angle to launch a regulation assault, to acquire vastly greater control.
The only good thing I can say about the powermongers currently on the move, is they're extremely obvious in what they're doing and why.
Why can't we just host our sites in Somalia or something?
May seem facetious but in all seriousness I was watching vice a few weeks ago and the Somali disapora is returning and building infrastructure and high quality housing with absolutely no government regulations or taxes.
They have vast means to prosecute sites like Backpage. As other articles have noted [1], the DOJ has refused to get involved in going after Backpage for years, which should be an outrage given the context.
The obvious conclusion is, it's all intentional. The DOJ has been told to stand down, so the SESTA pushers can build up a case for the need for new legislation, new levers of power & control over the Internet.
[1] "CDA 230 does not shield platforms from federal prosecution. The law very clearly outlines that exception to the liability shield, anticipating that crimes like child pornography and child exploitation would be prosecuted by the federal authorities. The US Department of Justice, for whatever reason, has not shown any inclination to pursue sites like Backpage."
By the way, Backpage has shut down their adult services section. Their traffic did not drop to zero however, as seen at [1].
That means that Backpages has had other substantial legitimate uses, besides adult services. Craigslist also had adult services section, that it voluntarily shut down [2]. This begs the question: why is Backpage prosecuted, but Craigslist was not? What has changed between 2009 and now?
Or of course consider how they went after Kim Dotcom, the effort that was put into crushing Megaupload and Kim over common media piracy.
Are we to believe that the DOJ & Co couldn't have smashed Backpage for knowingly allowing trafficking years ago? They couldn't have scooped up proof that the operators knew about that activity, a dozen different ways given the tools at their disposal? They could destroy Silk Road and get Ross Ulbricht, but they couldn't get the Backpage guys on anything? Bullshit of course, it's beyond obvious those guys knew what their site was facilitating, they were making a vast fortune off of it.
It all reeks of being allowed to continue as an enemy number one to facilitate legislation like SESTA.
Maybe I just don't fully understand the bill...but how is this not an open and shut violation of the first amendment? Not in the usual "i can say what i want and nobody can stop me" kind of way, but in the "government cannot directly censor its citizens" kind of way. Particularly with the inclusion of automated filtering, it sounds like the government mandating that all internet companies disallow anyone from posting content matching a set of parameters. The target (sex trafficking content) doesn't matter, the important thing here is that its sweeping government mandated censorship, with legal ramifications.
Am I missing something that makes this constitutionally allowable?
While I agree that SESTA is a bad idea, does anyone have the full context for this quote from Blumenthal?
> Goldman: There's no doubt that the legitimate players will do everything they can to not only work with the law enforcement and other advocates to address sex trafficking and will do more than they even do today. At the same time, the industry is not just the big players. There is a large number of smaller players who don't have the same kind of infrastructure. And for them they have to make the choice: can I afford to do the work that you're hoping they will do.
> Blumenthal: And I believe that those outliers -- and they are outliers -- will be successfully prosecuted, civilly and criminally under this law.
I'd like to believe a more charitable interpretation he misunderstood the point of Goldman's question and the "outliers" he's referring to are the "illegitimate players" (as opposed to the "legitimate players" that Goldman references). I personally doubt that he was saying that the "smaller players" are the outliers who will be prosecuted.
IMO, saying "But in that unusual moment of candor, Sen. Blumenthal seemed to lay bare his opinions about Internet startups—he thinks of them as unimportant outliers and would prefer that the new law put them out of business" is quite disingenuous. The zinger at the end weakens the quote with its trite outrage. Just having the first part of the quote -- "But in that unusual moment of candor, Sen. Blumenthal seemed to lay bare his opinions about Internet startups—he thinks of them as unimportant outliers" -- would be a more accurate characterization, and is just as powerful.
I just saw the new Kingsman movie. Minor spoiler alert:
In the movie, the US President is complicit in a scheme that would kill all the recreational drug users in the world. Blumenthal's comment reminds me of this. The guy's an idiot.
This makes the point that SESTA would disproportionately harm small/new businesses compared to big/existing ones. Which gets me thinking, there are some people (those involved with the big/existing businesses) for whom that is a feature, not a bug. Less competition for them to spend time crushing. Which means there's a chance this isn't actually about sex trafficking at all, but just another big-business power-grab on behalf of Blumenthal's backers. My cynicism knows no bounds.
but google will die under the mountain of lawsuits and justice for their various crooked enterprises, not to mention people are going to (again) get sick and tired of being spied on by f'ing corporations.
This time it's sex trafficking as the excuse.
It seems whenever it's time to try internet regulation again, dip deep into the jar of sex related justifications.