One of the more heated conversations (aside from politics, as always) at last night's social event(s) was the growing concern about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal law that offers very great protection to websites of all stripes, including TER, BackPage, CraigsList, etc.
A
potentially significant change in the law is in the works, passed by Congress and soon on the President's desk for action.
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltech...bout-to-change
Potentially significant has already forced some changes.
CL has closed its personals sections. TER has shut down some of its U.S. sections. BackPage has acknowledged the potential issues but nothing in its ad sections have changed at this moment.
However, some very large U.S. based web corporations and operations have very publicly protested, indeed lobbied Congress to NOT make the change. Think large as in FaceBook, Google, Twitter, Yelp, and the internet community-wide Electronic Freedom Foundation,
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 which cited serious flaws in the law's revisions, making it pretty obvious (to me and to other observers) that federal lawsuits challenging the new law will be filed quite soon.
One thought occurs to me and that is the "law of unintended consequences" which holds that lawmakers often think they are doing the right thing by passing a law, but then that new law allows or causes other things to happen, which were not intended nor even thunk out.
Here's one "thunk" from my perspective.
Right now, pay for play -- e.g. "prostitution" -- is not a federal crime but is regulated by the States.
Part of the new law appears to federalize prostitution as criminal. And allow States some leeway in using the new law to prosecute.
So here's the conundrum (which is not a sex barrier device) which will quickly (imo) face some judges in both federal and state courts -- perhaps think California? -- considering that recent legal rulings and laws have acted to truly free all U.S. citizens from restrictions on gender bias, such as same gender marriage, and enable adults to more or less do what ever they want socially.
Up next on the marriage "legal" frontier will be "plural marriages" especially considering that immigrant Muslims such as one man with two or three legal wives are allowed into the country with the relationship legally intact.
Not too far a step from there, legally, to predict that federal and state laws prohibiting and criminalizing adult P4P will soon face increased legal challenges, which, imo, could add way more protection to review and ad websites.
Think about it!
The case of Section 230 and the "Law of Unintended Consequences"
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