A few months now, the US government decided to crackdown on escort advertising via Backpage, which notably took only bitcoin to pay for those ads. Although Backpage had hoped to have the situation resolved within a few months, it seems like escort ads won’t be returning anytime soon or ever. If you are unaware what backpage is, it is a classified site that ended up becoming a safehaven for escorts and random encounters when craigslist removed those categories a few years ago.
Backpage had gone by relatively unnoticed until they were served with a cease and desist out of nowhere. While some escorts are still using the website in unintended ways, for example posting cryptically in the dating sections, many have left the platform entirely to find a new site. This is what the government fails to understand. There will ALWAYS be another backpage that will cater to the needs of escorts because the way things used to be in the industry was terrible.
Whether you condone escorting/prostitution or not, it will always happen regardless of the law. Some countries have legalized it because they realize that doing so would bring in tax revenue, make the workers and customers safer through imposed regulations. Statistics of success from places like Nevada or Amsterdam show that legalization of prostitution ends up working in all the intended ways.
I think the backlash is mostly from many people that are ignorant about the situation as a whole. They believe the majority of girls that are in the escorting business are sex slaves brought in from other countries. While some of them might be, those types of people are not usually posting on sites like backpage, but rather run their own agencies. The average backpage escort is a freelance sex worker who has no pimp and does the job because it is a way to support themselves.
If we look back at the 70s and 80s, the conditions of sex workers were the complete opposite and often extremely dangerous. Now and days escorts rent a room in an upscale hotel, meet for an hour or so and then part ways, back in the day in cities like New York City, you would have to stand on the street corner in the freezing cold, get into the car of some stranger and pay a pimp for protection. In addition these pimps would usually have their girls hooked on drugs so they could control them. The internet alone, through places like craigslist, has almost overnight made pimps irrelevant and made the business much safer.
This is what the government fails to see when they go after sites like backpage, that they are providing an efficiency in the market and doing it in a way that is safer and better for all. Rather than cracking down on every site and continuously making it harder for escorts to run their own business and make a living, simply not enforcing might be the best solution. Sex Slave rings need to be addressed and broken up, so spend your time searching for the people who run them rather than brining down a site which might be occasionally used by one. There will always be another site and there will always be someone willing to address the demand in the market.