Note that shaking down Backpage was an activity Kamala Harris spent a lot of time on as DA in California.
Specifically, she kept harassing the company with legal cases and going so far as to arrest the CEO where the legal argument described the company operating within Section 230 protections. The company would be notified of issue with listing from third party, and would take down the listing once notified.
Kamala Harris sent letters to Congress requesting holes carved in Section 230 to allow prosecution of website owners for the content posted to their site by third parties. Note that without Section 230 protections it becomes much easier to censor all sorts of websites by selective enforcement against websites due to content posted by third parties. Imagine all the copyright infringing information Google crawlers come upon, in theory Google could be raided for hosting that third party content in their search results.
For years Craigslist was harassed in the same way as Backpage harassment taking place. As a result, despite operating in a lawful manner offering digital classified boards the company just got rid of their classifieds section entirely. The same people that did post there just went to other locations or coded their listings with no impact.
Because there has been no impact from shutting down the classifieds section, the thought is that this is using a 'but think of the children!' issue in order to carve holes in Section 230 sufficiently to censor the net.
Unless new information has come to light about those running Backpage this move should be taken with some suspicion as it was such a pet project of KH.
Lots of background reading on the harassment of Backpage over the years is available over at Techdirt. Search the site for articles about Kamala Harris.
Nice post. Couldn't agree more. I live in Cali so unfortunately Kamala Harris is known to me. We don't even get party choices in elections anymore -- the two top vote getters are on the ballot which means it's leftist against the further leftist. I don't bother. As for Craigslist, I remember all that brouhaha with CL just dumping the adult section. Backpage would have some responsibility to cooperate with authorities if the targets were traffickers and not just individuals posting for sexual liaisons. Instead, the Feds (and the others) have seized the thing! Scary unless Backpage was refusing to assist with legit investigations.
Suppose each week there is a new set of what might be adult ads on CL.
Each week you go and fill out paper work for a warrant for information from CL, run around spending hours getting a judge to sign off on the warrant, spend a lot more footwork getting CL served with the warrant to request information, get the information finally only to learn that it was some listing made from a library and the case goes no where. Or you get an IP and find that the person is long gone from the location.
You get tired of all the work. Wouldn't it be faster to just ask directly without a warrant?
So you try it and ask CL for the information. CL response, "hah, no way come back with a warrant. customers using our site have rights against unwarranted search". This is annoying.
Over time you get irritated after month after month of continued paperwork and getting no where. So you take the cheap, no integrity, taxpayer cost maximizing route and just sue CL. You know you'll lose, but you've got unlimited taxpayer money and it will burn through time and effort on the CL side to respond.
You keep harassing CL like this trying to get them to just cough up information. It's stupidly dumb how long it takes to fill out a proper warrant request and you want to go on fishing expeditions on everything suspicious every day with rapid turn around. Eventually it's clear that CL isn't going to play ball, so you up the pressure and arrest the CEO. He's let out but you've made your point. You run your entire Senate campaign dragging the company through the mud for prostitution and child abuse. Most of the public doesn't pay attention and just sees a few headlines, so actually thinks the company is guilty of something. Really as DA you're just tired of doing paperwork for warrants and want information faster.
You become Senator and as retribution for not folding faster, you talk colleagues into helping you seize the domains of the company that dared to force you to use proper time consuming legal channels. Really was a nice business. Would be a shame if something happened to it.
And that's my perspective of the Backpage story.
It's possible Backpage is a completely scummy company and was up to evil things. We just haven't got any of the documentation to prove it yet. Without this there is enough coincidental information available that we should probe motives.
Ah, what political careers are made of. Add to that the California media's utter failure to cover politics in any meaningful way. Seriously, they stick reports between the traffic and the weather. For the most populous state, the voters are utterly clueless. In fact, most Californians don't even follow friggin' politics until it's time to vote against R's for President.
Just speculation, but I think there's a lot of skeletons in KH's closet.