This guy "meiji" mocked me several years ago in my original post for suggesting that the US was a Puritan hellhole.
Yeah, it was this thread, but wasn't that hard to find since in the year and a half you've been on this site you've posted a grand total of 12 times. I mocked you because you said a lot of wrong things appealing to the hysterical element about the US, like "The country is a police state like the Taliban with severe prohibitions and prosecutions of sexual entertainment." And even what you are saying now is just as bad. The American commercial scene is not
"completely gone". Things are certainly looking grim, but that's no excuse to spout bullshit. Let's look at the actual facts, shall we?
0. I'll go on record again to say that FOSTA/SESTA is scary shit, not because it's getting in the way of me getting to hobby, but because it's taking a giant bite out of the 1st Amendment and endangering sex workers and those that are trafficked.
1. The only true crackdown was against Backpage, which had been fighting an ongoing battle against the government regarding sex trafficking. Backpage (and Craigslist when it had an erotic section) was the dregs of the hobby scene, where men go to get disappointed at best and ripped off at worst. If this is what you considered the commercial scene, I feel sorry for your hobby life.
2. internet sites are fungible. Western countries (on behalf of large media companies) have attacked The Pirate Bay in a battle going on for a decade or more. It's still up, because it's used various internet technologies to do so.
3. As to the specifics, while its scary that this is happening, the vast majority of sites haven't been shut down by the government, and most are very likely going to re-open once they've moved off-shore. Preferred 411? Still there. Rubmaps moved offshore. USAsexguide as others have mentioned is planning to move offshore. ECCIE is gone, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it moves offshore. Far from being 'completely gone' I've been able to get appointments with a number of different K-girl organizations that still exist in the Bay Area, who started up their own websites when it looked like FOSTA/SESTA was about to be signed.
There's way too much business to be done for these sites to go away forever and doom the hobby in the US, and they'd have to crack down a lot harder than they already are to make a real dent, and short of arresting half of the mid level managers in Silicon Valley and most large cities in the US, there's not much else they can do.
The people responsible for this calamity are Republicans. The bills were initiated by Republican lawmakers for the most part, and signed by a Republican president.
I consider myself a liberal, but have no doubt that there's plenty of Dems that are really happy about this law too. There were 77 co-sponsors of this bill in the Senate, and CA Dem Senator Kamala Harris has been a strong proponent of cracking down on the hobby since she was a DA in San Francisco.
