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The Story of Dealing With 33 Attorneys General
microbee writes "Early this year, Topix, a popular community forum, faced investigation from 33 state Attorneys General for the practice of charging a fee for 'expedited review' of content that was flagged as inappropriate. The case was settled on August 9th, with Topix dropping the fees in question. Now TechCrunch is running an article by Topix CEO Chris Tolles, in which he talks about his experiences dealing with so many Attorneys General. Quoting: 'This is going to happen more — The States' Attorneys General are the place that complaints about your company will probably end up. This is especially true if you host a social or community based site where people can post things that others may dislike. And, there's no downside to attacking a company based in California for these guys (MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist have all been targets in the past couple of years). Taking complaints from your citizenry and turning them into political capital is simply too good an opportunity for these guys to pass up.'"
My assumption would be that if 33 attorneys general are trying to get a company to change its behavior, they're doing it because they must have gotten quite a few complaints, not because they're attention whores.
When the AG's issue press releases instead of talking to the company about their concerns, you should assume the AG's are doing it for the media attention. According to the article, the AG's did this with both press releases. The first time, the release lied by claiming they had sent a letter to to company when the letter wasn't postmarked until five days later. The second time, the AG's never expressed to the company the changes they'd like to see made before villifying them in the press.
Maybe the article is wrong and the company is lying about the AG's behavior. The article doesn't say whether the reporter tried to get the AG's side of the story, which probably means the reporter didn't. However, if the accusations in the article are true, then then, yes, the AG's were acting like "attention whores".
Yes, we care about the hookers. Not because they're hookers, but because when an Attorney General is involved with an organized ring of anything illegal, then he's a hypocrite and has huge conflict of interest problems. And when a hypocrite gets to make the rules, he isn't affected by them - so he has no motivation to make sure they're just and practicable. He got caught by a money laundering law that he had passed so he could catch other people doing the same thing. He demanded very high standards from everybody else, it's why he was elected Governor in the first place. So now he gets to pay the piper.
You honestly don't see a problem with the Attorney General of a state being involved with a madam? Because it was going on while he was the Attorney General - the person in charge of prosecutions across the state. The conflict of interest posed by a state's top prosecutor being involved in an organized criminal enterprise is simply unacceptable, even if you think that the particular crime in question ought not be a crime at all. Was Spitzer protecting his call girls from prosecution while prosecuting others? What would have happened if the criminal enterprise in question started to blackmail Spitzer? Things can go seriously south in all kinds of unpleasant ways from here. Supposing the outfit he got the call girls from hired thugs to shake people down. How is Spitzer supposed to put a stop to that?