Bowing to public pressure from a nationwide cadre of law enforcement officials, Craigslist said Wednesday that it would shutter the "erotic services" section of its website and pledged to closely vet ads for massages, escorts and other adult services that fall short of prostitution.
Attorneys general credited the San Francisco company with making progress in trying to drive sex-for-sale activity from the online bazaar, where millions of people congregate daily to buy houses and haircuts, sofas and swim lessons.
They said that reducing the number of potentially illegal advertisements on such a popular website would create considerable obstacles for those looking to find or sell prostitution services.
"You're not going to have the volume of it; you're not going to have the ease of it," said Illinois Atty. Gen Lisa Madigan, a leading crusader against the erotic services section. "I think this is going to be an effective strategy."
Craigslist opened a new section called "adult services" and said its staff would review every listing before posting it. The price of adult ads will double to $10 from $5.
But rather than ease the general problem of prostitution, experts said, the cleaning up of Craigslist could complicate it.
The primary law that the sex trade follows is that of supply and demand, said Lt. Dennis Ballas of the Los Angeles Police Department's vice squad. Though he lauded Craigslist for its cooperation, Ballas noted that plenty of smaller, more narrowly focused websites for peddling prostitution remained -- sites that were further off the beaten path and tougher for law enforcement to monitor.
"If they were to shut it down in its entirety," he said, referring to prostitution on Craigslist, "we as investigators would have to dig deeper to find those other sites."
Craigslist Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster said in an interview that the site had come to the decision after carefully weighing input from law enforcement, users, legitimate online businesses and free speech advocates.
"It was a balancing act where we're trying to respond to feedback to constituencies that we felt were important," he said. "When you're talking about attorneys general who are the top legal authority in their respective states, that was feedback that we felt was important to take into account."
The site stopped accepting erotic services ads and will remove all old listings in a week.
