Greetings. In Crucifying Craigslist, I expressed my concerns over government authorities attempting to dictate the content of Internet sites, in particular that of Craigslist.

Due to such pressures -- especially including threats from the South Carolina attorney general Henry McMaster, Craigslist moved to replace their "erotic services" category with a monitored "adult services" category.

My fear, which now appears to have been proven justified, is that by caving in to demands that appear to be clearly not justifiable under federal law, Craigslist was doing the functional equivalent of paying off a blackmailer. As is quite well known, if you pay a blackmailer once, the odds are that you will be rewarded with an accelerating stream of ever more outrageous demands and threats.

This is the pattern we're now seeing in the Craigslist case.

Craigslist agreed to remove its un-prescreened erotic services category, even though their only legal requirement was to remove already posted materials upon notification of a clear violation of law.

But this naturally didn't satisfy the SC AG, who is piling on more demands, threatening lawsuits and criminal investigations against Craigslist personnel, and in general grandstanding against "the damned Internet" with the maximum possible bluster.

Now comes word that Craigslist's CEO has himself demanded an apology from McMaster (probability of receiving that apology is 0%, of course). It appears that the situation is rapidly spinning out of control in a very bad way.

While I personally wouldn't have handled all this in exactly the manner that Craigslist has chosen, I have the benefit of not being the one threatened with shackled perp walks, either (well, at least so far).

But ultimately, what we're seeing in this case is a microcosm of enormous battles to come over control over Internet content, search engines, and virtually every aspect of the enormous communications capabilities that the Internet has conferred on ordinary people way beyond historical bounds.

This capability can certainly be abused, and to be sure some governments and government officials are in an ever more desperate tizzy looking for ways to clamp down on free speech by attacking the messengers -- the Internet services themselves -- as a shortcut to their real goal, controlling the speech of individuals.

That's not to say that illegal acts should not be properly prosecuted. But in the Internet age, personal responsibility has been thrust squarely onto the center stage. Governmental attacks on Internet services as the proxied surrogates of individual players -- for example, the persons who choose to place ads on Craigslist -- are not only inappropriate, but must be fought back with more than simple due diligence.

The current Craigslist battle is but a harbinger of the titanic struggles to come over who controls the Internet and its content. Even if you couldn't care less about erotic ads and have never used Craigslist, this is still a war of importance to you -- and to your children who will ultimately inherent the Internet and its controversies.

It is imperative that we take the strongest possible stand -- right now -- against inappropriate governmental meddling and threats relating to Internet content. There are forces in play whose ultimate goal is to twist the Internet into a prescreened, lowest-common-denominator, governmentally-straitjacketed and impotent shadow of its current self, and in the process eliminate untold numbers of important future applications before they can ever be born.

Controlling communications means controlling the future. We should not and must not allow political grandstanding and associated threats to undermine what we have built or snuff out the wonders still to come.

As Lily Tomlin used to say, "And that's the truth."

--Lauren--