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The New Law That Killed Craigslist’s Personals Could End the Web as We’ve Known
- hoodoof 9y agoGovernments value higher control and tighter laws over anything else. There will be more.
- thriftwy 9y agoWe 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 9y agoAre 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 9y agoThere 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 9y agoI 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 9y agoWhy doesn't "government" go against bittorrent? Oh, I forgot, they can't! Nevermind.
- ben_w 9y agoIf 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 9y agoThey used to care pretty strongly. That's a fact. They also didn't do much about it. Also a fact.
- Erlangolem 9y agoIronically 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.
- vfulco 9y agoAgree a million percent.
- pmoriarty 9y ago"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 9y agoIf 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.
- mudil 9y agoRonald 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."
- OtterCoder 9y agoI 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.
- stevenwoo 9y agoWhat is your proposal for craigslist to continue their personals/mixed connections and comply with the law? Stopping is an easy solution to eliminate liability.
- mirimir 9y ago> 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. As long as you're willing to risk paying requisite attorney fees. Craigslist apparently wasn't.
- kstenerud 9y agoLarge, established companies with expensive legal advice and financial incentives to not dismantle parts of their business model seem to disagree.
- jupiter90000 9y agoI 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_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness#Precedent_... 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.
- veridies 9y agoI 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.
- icebraining 9y agoThe same could be said about governments.
- imustbeevil 9y agoExcept the government employs 2.7+ million people. If Google ran the DMV there'd be no one working at the building, no support email, no customer service, and you'd have to get answers to questions from other pedestrians on unofficial forums.
- ianai 9y agoYou made a genuinely good comment. Sorry it got downvotes.
- malvosenior 9y agoYou choose a funny example. I can't imagine the hellish nightmare that would be trying to email the DMV for support. If Google ran the DMV we'd get our drivers licenses instantly delivered in digital form to our Android phones. We wouldn't have to stand in line or "take a number" and waste a day in a filthy office building packed to the brim with disgruntled bureaucrats.
- narrator 9y agoThe whole Web showed up for net neutrality and this bill was completely ignored until they took down Craigslist personals. What the hell happened?
- gcb0 9y agoeveryone that I know in tech that was involved in this one, with half a brain, just walked out of discussions. left was the corrupt, lobbists and idiots-puppets-think-of-the-children. really, early on nobody thought this could ever be taken seriously. guess engineers suck at politics. (still have to see what the lawyers that were involved are saying now).
- rocqua 9y agoI never heard of this bill until after it was passed. Feels like more could have been done if this publicity had come earlier.
- arca_vorago 9y agoThe same thing that happens any time the oligarchy wants legislation... they just took the losses and kept trying until one time we weren't paying attention. I have seen this coming for a while now. Once the oligarchy understood the internet is the last bastion of anarchistic fredom of thought they immediately wanted to take control over it somehow.
- mirimir 9y agoAlso embedded in the spending bill[0] is the CLOUD Act:[1] > The CLOUD Act (S. 2383 and H.R. 4943) has two major components. First, it empowers U.S. law enforcement to grab data stored anywhere in the world, without following foreign data privacy rules. Second, it empowers the president to unilaterally enter executive agreements with any nation on earth, even known human rights abusers. Under such executive agreements, foreign law enforcement officials could grab data stored in the United States, directly from U.S. companies, without following U.S. privacy rules like the Fourth Amendment, so long as the foreign police are not targeting a U.S. person or a person in the United States. 0) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflected-cloud-act-passes https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflect... 1) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/new-backdoor-around-fourth-amendment-cloud-act https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/new-backdoor-around-fo...
- purplezooey 9y agoI 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 9y agoWhy would we do anything to inhibit useful and compliant surveillance companies that both inevitably serve to widen the poverty gap?
- yters 9y agoCensorship of the internet is inevitable, and traffic that cannot be censored will be dropped.
- golemotron 9y agoIt's a positive. We'll re-discover the real world.
- unwind 9y agoMeta but mods: please edit the title. It's missing a word and looks sad.
- kakarot 9y agoThe New Law That Killed Craigslist's Personals Could End the Web, as We've Known (For Quite Some Time).
- masonic 9y agoThis 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 9y agoNot 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.
- mkempe 9y agoNow, why would Facebook's Sandberg openly support FOSTA? further, who else is in favor of this kind of attack on the Web?
- SJWDisagree111 9y agoNo one on HN wants to hear it but this is part of the Feminist agenda.
- s2g 9y agoFeels like there is a new internet dooming law every couple years.
- marssaxman 9y agoThe web as we knew it ended some years ago. The thing that exists now is... well... it's nice, I suppose.