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Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

And most likely the next (or the one after that) will be run by someone outside the USA, either in a place where cooperation with US authorities is unlikely or where prostitution is legal and thus any extradition requests (if anything got that far) would be less likely to be honored.

Heck, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the next one run out of Russia, particularly if clients had to do some form of registration to get full access. Out of all the users you might get a few interesting email addresses worth tracking long-term, and you might even get reused passwords or at least a password pattern for some of those.

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That wouldn't be unheard of. There was a regional site in the SF Bay a few years back (myRedBook) registered out of Seychelles. Whole lot of good that did them though, since they still picked up their checks in the valley.

The government went after the payment processors. I suppose someone could run such site as a side hobby project, but end of the day it's a classifieds site, and it needs to accept money from those paying for classifieds.

You're missing my other point in there - if you have the technical skills, language skills, and particularly mostly user-generated content (so you don't have to push much content of your own anyway), how much would you figure a site like that might cost to run on an annual basis? Seems to me that it could probably disappear into just the annual marketing budget of Durex, Trojans, with almost no notice, just to present one set of people also related to the sex industry.

My bigger concern is that commercial entities (with their profit-driven motive and legal exposure) wouldn't be the only ones interested in the question of "Who's illegally hiring prostitutes AND do their hiring patterns indicate anything special about their interests?"

A few hosted servers or VMs, some dedicated bandwidth in a few datacenters, a few cutouts and "private investors" backing it who don't actually care about making profits, and you have a priceless intelligence source about horny people - mostly of no interest at all, but a few potentially of great interest and value. What would be the worth of a Senator or Representative with embarrassing interests? It's not like elected officials ever get caught in airport bathrooms, diapers, or sending tacky selfies on Twitter.

Good points, technical costs are fairly minimal, considering that the court case lists a grand total of 3 operators.

Considering the nature of business, Backpage likely used payments not just as a revenue source, but as a filtering mechanism protecting against excessive spam. Even if you're not in the industry, there's some motivation to post a fake ad just to prank (or shame) someone, play a bad joke on the ex, insert a URL or two to get some free Web traffic, etc. Payment requirement somewhat mitigates the spam/prank/fake threat, which happens to appeal to consumers as well.

I think the intelligence argument is overstated - communications of such nature are typically handled by phone/SMS/temp email anyways, and if someone is worried about their IP being tracked, they are likely to employ Tor or commercial VPN service.

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