Google Will Survive SESTA – Startups Might Not

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.

If one wanted to uncover criminal wrongdoing on the internet, the last thing one would want to do is lose the signal.

It won't stop the activity, it will push it to a place that is harder to detect.

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.

Can someone explain why the reporting requirements of 18 US 2258A aren't sufficient? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A

Why cannot they be simply amended to include sex trafficking?

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?

If we are talking about legislation to regulate communication platforms that "enable sex trafficking" [needs disambiguation]...

... then why aren't we talking about hotels, where victims are sex trafficked,

and cars, where victims are sex trafficked,

and cash, which facilitates anonymous sex trafficking

and planes, which facilitates international sex trafficking

Why stop at the internet? Let's go after every company on Earth.

/s

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.

I wonder if this will do anything to encourage a more decentralized web?

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.

so that part of the headline is irrelevant.

Also SESTA is bad. booo SESTA.