Markets for prostitution are banned. But that's not my point: my point is that at multiple steps along the way, Larkin and Lacey were told what they could do to mitigate the harm their site was causing to children, and they refused to do it.

For the nth time, I'm receptive to the harm reduction argument for sites like Backpage. They just need to be run by people who won't try to profit from child prostitution.

Supporters of Backpage can talk tough on message boards in advance of the trial, but those guys are going to lose in court, and lose bad. It's a nightmare indictment. This notion that they're going to prevail at trial seems like it depends on the idea that the jury is going to nullify for two middle aged men who knowingly profited from child sex trafficking. It's not going to happen.

Again, the indictment does not rely on sex trafficking having taking place. If the judge allows this to be brought up in court at all, the jury would likely still be instructed to make their decision regardless of whether they believe such charges to be true, since it does not factor into the US Codes under which the defendants are charged.

That leaves the moral question.

They were running a board posting prostitution ads. We agree that this is a-ok. The claim is that in some cases, some of the posts were advertising underage prostitution or sex trafficking. The number is disputed, but I think we can also agree it was a minority. I am sure we can further agree that inevitably, since some sex trafficking exists, someone will try to advertise it.

The attorney generals, or NCMEC, argued that Backpage should shutdown it's prostitution section, citing, among other things, sex trafficking. You are open to the idea that in the name of harm reduction, such a section should exist, though. So ok, Backpage doesn't shut it down.

Some suggestions were made how Backpage might otherwise reduce sex trafficking occurring on their website. Those included things like having submitters provide ID documents. It seems that you believe that refusing to do so is what made Backpage evil, when it otherwise would have been ok. That obviously depends on the sensibility of those suggestions. Maybe you think that they were no-brainers, likely to save the lives of thousands of children. I think they were invasive, made in bad faith, not likely to make a difference, yet totally undermining the Backpage as harm reduction argument.

Suffice it to say that I don't want to run a prostitution website with your blessing, but on the mercy of a bunch of attorney generals not being able to convince you that I didn't do "enough" to combat abuse. That seems like a precarious position to be in.

Now maybe if they did require IDs, or implemented other changes, they would have gained your approval. But it is unlikely it would have saved them from an indictment, or from the ire of sex-trafficking hysterics, nor the politicians trying to ride the PR wave.

There are sites that work differently than Backpage. They have advertisers maintain permanent profiles. They have higher barriers to entry and more checks. They may require a login to see any content. This gains them a lower profile, but ultimately does not protect them (see Redbook, Rent Boy, and probably others I do not recall right now).

The majority of sex workers are neither sex trafficking victims, nor high-class escorts with a Twitter profile. A lot of them might be similar to, say, the mother portrayed in the film Florida Project. They don't want to maintain a profile. This is not their full time job. They might post an ad today to earn some money, then delete it tomorrow. Backpage served this clientele. The silver lining here might be that the government is not, now, in the possession of the identities of tens of thousands of these woman.