The Las Vegas Courtesan

I know I’m a little behind on this but I came across it the other day and somehow wasn’t surprised after the idiot in New England murdered a girl who’s ad was posted on Craigslist. Ever since the District Attorneys for the 40 some-odd states bent Craigslist over their knee to comply with tracking ads, I wasn’t surprised it came down to this. Of course they are just renaming the section but now they will manually screen the posts.

Obviously this is a bad move for Craigslist and a bad move for Internet free speech, or net neutrality. The company has now put themselves into a position that they will be taking some sort of liability by actually posting the ads manually, even though they have no control to the act the person ends up doing after getting a customer through the site. I am all for free speech on the Internet and the whole guidelines that the 1996 Federal Communications Act helped create by protecting the businesses that had web sites run by user generated content, but this is taking a step back and bending for the government so that they have more control. Prostitution is going to happen, no matter how hard you try to stop it. I think Craigslist made some of the police departments around the country kind of lazy because to them, it was like shooting fish in a barrel!

I, personally, used to post ads on Craigslist years ago and stopped when they first started cracking down (especially after I got busted myself) and haven’t really been back since. To me I did it because I had run out of all other options and it was slow around town and walking through casinos and sitting at bars made me really nervous. I just don’t see what the big deal was on there. Men would call up immediately on the phone as soon as it was posted (mostly locals) and were trying to see how far their $150 would go, but then would act extremely insulted when I said that would be okay for a starting point. It rarely got me decent $ and all of the clients had a holier-than-thou attitude. I like it when people treat me on the same level, not like they are so far above me… so I got annoyed quick and after going to jail for it, I stopped.

The funny thing is I found out about this from my new favorite website, http://www.textsfromlastnight.com on a post over here . If you have a spare few hours, the site is hilarious.