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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

I just read the text of this bill. The way it reads, the entire online dating industry should be closing its doors...tonight. CEOs of these companies face penalties of up to 25 years in prison. Why were there not massive protests over this? I had never heard of this bill before today.

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I recommend that you subscribe to the blog of the EFF, and perhaps consider membership. They’ve been following this law in it’s various guises for quite some time, and providing tools for concerned citizens to contact their representatives effectively.

Here’s some analysis of the proposals from October 2017:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/sex-trafficking-expert...

I’ll definitely subscribe and pay more attention to these issues. Thanks for the link!

Meanwhile, net neutrality, which wasn't even policy until the Obama administration gets huge press all over the place. What happened to Silicon Valley's political activism?

Good question... almost like they might not be telling you the truth when the say they are riled up about X because of Y. The silence on Z is deafening.

NN rules predate the Obama administration in various forms.

because the bill was introduced and passed in under 24 hours!

it'll be selectively enforced; small players will be pushed out because they can't afford the liability, and the behemoths will use their weight to ensure nothing happens to them.

> it'll be selectively enforced

This is the crux. These laws are not meant to be enforced universally.

The objective is having ammunition to use when other motives determine the target to strike.

Nobody listens to sex workers.

Possibly, but this is so broadly written that it reaches far beyond sex workers to the executives of massive enterprises - who usually are listened to. It essentially says that if you own any website and don't do enough to prevent prostitution from occurring through it, you go to prison for 10 years if there were 1-4 prostitutes on the site, and 25 years if there were 5 or more prostitutes on the site. Additionally, people "injured" by the offense can seek civil damages and attorneys fees. That presumably includes the sex workers themselves, if they claim they were forced to be on there by someone else.

Executives at Tinder, POF, Match.com, etc. should be shaking in their boots right now. Even Facebook and other social networks could have civil and criminal exposure under this law.

>I had never heard of this bill before today.

Who was going to tell you about it? Time, NYT, CNN, WaPo? Nope.

Oh they told you about it, they were favorable to it:

[Feb 14 2018] "Don’t Let Criminals Hide Their Data Overseas"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/14/opinion/data-overseas-leg...

[Mar 5 2018] "A promising solution is the Cloud (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data) Act, introduced by a bipartisan coalition in the Senate last month."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-global-game-of-wha...

Both of these are opinion page pieces. Newspapers publish a wide variety of these without endorsing the position.

they still pick the opinions they publish.

Because atoms are in limited supply. It does not mean endorsement.

In fairness, your links are opinion pieces not staff reporting.

And there's some staff reporting as well, which is actually pretty reasonable. This is from the Post last August:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/08/01...

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