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Cloudflare: FOSTA Was a 'Very Bad Bill' That's Left the Internet's Infrastructure Hanging (vice.com)
Last week, President Donald Trump signed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) into law. It's a bill that penalizes any platform found "facilitating prostitution," and has caused many advocacy groups to come out against the bill, saying that it undermines essential internet freedoms. The most recent entity to decry FOSTA is Cloudflare, which recently decided to terminate its content delivery network services for an alternative, decentralized social media platform called Switter. Motherboard talked to Cloudflare's general counsel, Doug Kramer, about the bill and he said that FOSTA was an ill-consider bill that's now become a dangerous law: "[Terminating service to Switter] is related to our attempts to understand FOSTA, which is a very bad law and a very dangerous precedent," he told me in a phone conversation. "We have been traditionally very open about what we do and our roles as an internet infrastructure company, and the steps we take to both comply with the law and our legal obligations -- but also provide security and protection, let the internet flourish and support our goals of building a better internet." Cloudflare lobbied against FOSTA, Kramer said, urging lawmakers to be more specific about how infrastructure companies like internet service providers, registrars and hosting and security companies like Cloudflare would be impacted. Now, he said, they're trying to figure out how customers like Switter will be affected, and how Cloudflare will be held accountable for them.
"We don't deny at all that we have an obligation to comply with the law," he said. "We tried in this circumstance to get a law that would make sense for infrastructure companies... Congress didn't do the hard work of understanding how the internet works and how this law should be crafted to pursue its goals without unintended consequences. We talked to them about this. A lot of groups did. And it was hard work that they decided not do." He said the company hopes, going forward, that there will be more clarity from lawmakers on how FOSTA is applied to internet infrastructure. But until then, he and others there are having to figure it out along with law enforcement and customers. "Listen, we've been saying this all along and I think people are saying now, this is a very bad law," Kramer said. "We think, for now, it makes the internet a different place and a little less free today as a result. And there's a real-world implication of this that people are just starting to grapple with."
"We don't deny at all that we have an obligation to comply with the law," he said. "We tried in this circumstance to get a law that would make sense for infrastructure companies... Congress didn't do the hard work of understanding how the internet works and how this law should be crafted to pursue its goals without unintended consequences. We talked to them about this. A lot of groups did. And it was hard work that they decided not do." He said the company hopes, going forward, that there will be more clarity from lawmakers on how FOSTA is applied to internet infrastructure. But until then, he and others there are having to figure it out along with law enforcement and customers. "Listen, we've been saying this all along and I think people are saying now, this is a very bad law," Kramer said. "We think, for now, it makes the internet a different place and a little less free today as a result. And there's a real-world implication of this that people are just starting to grapple with."
You are a nation that is fundamentally happy with the idea of people shooting children when they are at school, but the barest glimpse of a nipple and its national indignation. Very strange priorities ...
Actually, it's more like selling someone a gun, then learning after the fact that they intend to use it to rob a bank, with the slight difference that, in this case, Cloudflare can take the gun back. In neither case, though, is there (nor should there be) any liability for the initial sale; except that FOSTA actually puts that liability on Cloudflare even though they have no way of knowing what someone will use their service for until after they've used it.
Now, if you want to say Cloudflare should be liable for illegal activities they're aware of, facilitated by their services, and don't take action to stop, we can probably agree on that. And, funny enough, that's exactly what the existing Safe Harbor laws already do.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/legal-prostitution-reduce-rape-holland
Here's another take on that Dutch study
The authors provide “causal evidence” of a 32 to 40 percent reduction in rape and sexual abuse within two years of a city opening a tippelzone. The higher number is for cities that license sex work in the tippelzone; the lower figure is for cities without a licensing process. “The decreases in sexual abuse are stronger in cities with licensed tippelzones.”
These gains fade over time.
Without precise data on the victims of sexual violence, it is not possible to determine exactly how the number of rapes and cases of sexual abuse fall in the population at large. Some victims are sex workers. But the authors believe the tippelzones lead “to a decrease in sexual violence on women more generally by providing an anonymous, appealing and easily accessible outlet for sex to otherwise violent individuals.”
When licensing is introduced after a tippelzone is established, it increases instances of sexual abuse and rape. This happens because, at first, the tippelzone attracts foreign prostitutes with dubious legal status. When they suddenly need licensing, many leave for “less controlled environments.”
Still, in a survey the authors cite, “95 percent of the interviewed prostitutes report feeling safer within the tippelzone.”
In cities with both a tippelzone and a licensing requirement, the authors find a 25 percent reduction in drug-related crimes within two years. That result persists beyond two years.
The authors do not find a relationship between tippelzones and weapons crimes or violent assaults.
As for perceptions, residents living near a tippelzone without a licensing system believe the tippelzone increases drug-related crime by 6 percent.
In cities where licensing requirements for sex workers are introduced at the same time as tippelzones, perceptions of drug-related crime fall across the city as a whole, though the perceptions rise slightly in areas near the tippelzones.
Seems like a mixed bag and certainly not definitive with "casual evidence".
https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/
A 2012 study published in World Development, “Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?” investigates the effect of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows into high-income countries. The researchers — Seo-Yeong Cho of the German Institute for Economic Research, Axel Dreher of the University of Heidelberg and Eric Neumayer of the London School of Economics and Political Science — analyzed cross-sectional data of 116 countries to determine the effect of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. In addition, they reviewed case studies of Denmark, Germany and Switzerland to examine the longitudinal effects of legalizing or criminalizing prostitution.
The study’s findings include:
Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.
Passed the senate 92-2. The vote was "Vote no if you are you a child rapist'
The vote would have gone no other way. So it lands on the President to veto crap like that if it passes. Even with a "veto proof majority". Especially with a veto-proof majority.
The problem is politics, where everything is framed by the bullies. If you don't vote for it, you'll be vilified.
Learn to love Alaska
The general sense I get from this is lawmakers either wanted to make a well-intentioned law but, didn't understand the internet well enough to write it, were informed it was bad as written and it would take far more research and work to design it to work as intended, and the lawmakers decided they didn't want to spend the time/work and passed "whatever" instead or anti-sin activists wanted to shut down smut sites on the internet and intentionally passed it under the guise of an anti-trafficking bill to slide it through. Both scenarios are believable so I'm not sure which is correct. It is possible that group 1 started the bill and group 2 hijacked it, too.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
After myredbook went down, rapes of sex workers went up almost 20% as they were forced to become streetwalkers again. Already articles are starting to appear about this problem surging again. This law will kill some sex workers.
As a legitimate licensed massage therapist, my independence is greatly cut down as it's hard to find a place to advertise now so only corporate massage outlets can advertise right now. I might have to go work for less than half the rate for massage envy or some place like that. If they'll even hire me (I'm old- but have over two decades experience helping people recover from car wrecks after their physical therapy money runs out, and to relieve migraines, and to help people with fibromyalgia, and people with various overwork syndromes-- but to a spa- they want only young attractive people.)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.