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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

See, I tried to address the inevitable "selective enforcement!" argument tersely, and it doesn't seem to have taken. On the off chance that literally repeating what I said before, with more words, will help:

The government cannot, logistically, make a case against every violator of a given law simultaneously. As big as they are, believe it or not, they are generally strapped for enforcement resources.

So, in a sense, all federal law enforcement is "selective". It of necessity has to be.

The principal then is, the selection criteria should be aligned with fairness and the best interests of the country.

Targeting the most lucrative violator of a given law seems entirely reasonable.

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To nudge this closer to a legal context (but IANAL), I think the GP comment is invoking the general idea of equal protection under the law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause). That is, the government should not selectively prosecute cases against those it does not like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_prosecution).

As the wiki article notes, this kind of argument tends to not be very successful.

One guidepost on when Equal Protection claims are more likely to be successful is the notion of "strict scrutiny" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny). For instance, if prosecutions are taken against people of one ethnic group, then these prosecutions are subject to a higher degree of judicial scrutiny and are more likely to be overturned.

As the parent comment to this one notes, targeting the most lucrative violator would seem to not be prejudicial in this way.

c.f. Wesley Snipes tax evasion case. Prosecuting famous people because they are famous is ok.

So it's like enforcing speed limit laws- the government can't possibly ticket every person who drives over the speed limit, so they ticket some percentage of speeders and from that expect that less people will speed.

Indeed, I agree. I just hope they follow through and use this case as a precedent to shut down or severely harm the other ad networks that do essentially the same thing.

> [Government] which is now holding websites liable for any illegal advertisements shown on their pages.

This could turn out to be a very dangerous precedent to make, and not good news at all for any listing related startup.

Even if you don't want to host these illegal ads, and you put measures in place to block and remove them, you might still be held liable. I'd hope they go after the main violators (both of the law and Adwords ToS) and not their unwilling messengers.

If all providers start actively trying to not touch these ads the expected incentive of posting them will go down; hopefully enough so that they end up having to negotiate directly with websites or something like this.

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