The oldest crime

No more will a business built on heinous sexual exploitation of children and trafficked young women flourish in plain sight, now that the Department of Justice has shut down the vile flesh pit known as Backpage.com and indicted its top leadership, securing a guilty plea to facilitating prostitution and money laundering from the website’s CEO.

Kudos to the Trump administration for waging this noble legal fight.

Prosecutors say girls and boys traded openly there ended up abused, raped, dead. The ringleaders made a mint. We won’t dignify the disgusting operation — which started as classified ads in New York’s own Village Voice — with a goodbye.

And no longer will this country countenance a full-view illegal flesh market as an acceptable price of life on the internet, any more than this city once did in Times Square, with the signing by President Trump of a federal law that holds internet operators open to criminal charges and civil liability should they indulge the buying and selling of sex on their servers.

FOSTA, Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, was a rare bipartisan piece of legislation that followed Senate hearings that exposed Backpage’s horrors. It makes a important breakthrough in how federal law treats harmful content on the internet.

Until now, a law called the Communications Decency Act has broadly shielded internet platforms, from Airbnb to YouTube, from legal liability for what happens there.

FOSTA makes an exemption for sites that promote or facilitate prostitution, and allows for prosecution and lawsuits in connection with sex trafficking — meaning that state attorneys general can now sue any company that dares to go down the dark road the Backpage.com gang traveled.

There are valid worries that the clampdown could drive prostitution further underground, leaving women, who have often been trapped in the profession by predators, even more vulnerable to harm.

That very real possibility must be met with vigorous efforts by law enforcement to open exits from sex-trafficking ordeals with the least possible criminal consequences. New York’s Human Trafficking Intervention Courts can be a model in that respect.

But finally, vile and misogynist organized crime will not flourish in plain sight.