The sudden ratcheting up of rhetoric around Craigslist's more risque listings has the words "criminal prosecution" being bandied about, and that has company executives fighting mad, with the emphasis on fighting. Craiglist tried to appease authorities in the wake of the unfortunately-branded "Craigslist killer" episode. They dropped their erotic services section. Appeasement didn't work. South Carolina attorney general Henry McMaster gave the company 10 days to remove all sections of the site that allow the solicitation of prostitution or the posting of pornographic materials. The steps the company took weren't up to snuff, and McMaster announced yesterday that the state will be forced to hold the company's executives personally liable. In the words of CEO Jim Buckmaster, "Seriously?"

McMaster is considered the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the term-limited South Carolina governor's seat. Politically, going after "the Internet" for sexual misconduct has been an electoral winner. For years, bills against child predation online have popped up in state legislatures, particularly in election years or when a potential candidate is eager to gain credibility as a "family values" or "tough on crime" candidate. So appealing is it as a political strategy that it's used as a cover for less popular public policy ends, like the music and movie industry's long war against peer-to-peer file sharing. P2P expose your kids to naked pictures of Hannah Montana, argue MPAA and RIAA. Congress, not really having the faintest clue what this "P2P" is, line up behind bills designed to tweak the settings on Kazaa and Napster and other programs no one uses anymore. (I should admit that I had something to do with the drafting of the original version of said bill, but that was many moons ago.)

The question is, how viable a political strategy is targeting the web for all its indecencies in 2009, where many more people intuitively understand how the Internet works, and how it doesn't, than did when these battles began. One commenter on Buckmaster's post points out that the Charleston Post and Courier, South Carolina's premiere paper, contained 15 ads for escort services on the same day McMaster threatened Craigslist with criminal prosecution. Should Craigslist find itself in court, the Internets might have handed the defendents their Exhibit A.