Lawmakers championing a bipartisan bill to make it easier to go after sex trafficking on the internet are on the verge of victory.
In the Senate, it's a large coalition led by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
The current law "was enacted back in 1996, 22 years ago when the internet was in its infancy," Portman said last week. "There needed to be something to help provide protection from liability. But, unfortunately, it has been used as a shield by these criminals to be able to sell women and children online without accountability. The same law written back then was also focused in part on keeping indecent material, pornography, from going to children, ironically, and now it's being used to shield these traffickers."
Senators voted Monday, 94-2, to limit debate on taking up the final amended version of the House-passed bill, with provisions from Portman and Blumenthal incorporated.
In developing the final bill, members of the House and Senate addressed some concerns raised by technology companies, which split on eventual support for the legislation.
That's apparent from the reaction to House passage of the bill from the Internet Association, which represents a diverse collection of Internet-based companies.
The group said it shared the goals of the supported legislators, but also voiced concerns about the effect of narrowing the immunity given to internet service providers _ so that companies like Backpage.com, which have been found to host sex trafficking classified ads, may be culpable.
Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., who introduced the underlying bill in the House, said Monday that the final deal tracks with the legislation she introduced in April 2017, and it appears more so than an amended version forwarded by the House Judiciary Committee.
"I'm just so thrilled to marry the two up and to finally reinstate the victim-centered provision that was in my original bill," Wagner said. "We have been working with advocates, with victims rights groups, with some of the tech community and most near and dear to my heart, with prosecutors and district attorneys and law enforcement."
"What this does on the criminal side is it allows these district attorneys to use both the sex trafficking statute and the prostitution statute, so they've got more tools in their toolboxes, more resources, however you want to put it, to make sure that they can go after these bad actor websites," Wagner said.
Some internet companies participated in the process to address concerns with the bill, while it appears that others largely worked for its defeat. Facebook is among the companies that have come down in favor of the bill.
Some companies were behind the legislative effort early on _ Wagner named IBM and Oracle as being on that list.
Tech companies learned it was not easy to be against a bill billed as getting tough on sex traffickers, but that's the predicament in which one of the primary authors of the 1996 communications law finds himself.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., of Oregon has been concerned that the bill being considered could make it harder to find sex traffickers and that Congress' overall lack of technological know-how could unintentionally hamper internet development.
"I take a backseat to no one when it comes to fighting sex trafficking and locking up the monsters who prey on the defenseless," he said when the bill passed the House. "I have authored laws to support victims and provide ongoing funding paid for by those convicted of heinous crimes against children, and authored laws to improve the child welfare system to help prevent children from becoming victims in the first place."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the bill could tip the scales in favor of powerhouse internet companies with large legal departments.
"They may also have the budgets to implement a mix of automated filters and human censors to comply with the law. Small startups don't. And with the increased risk of litigation, it would be difficult for new startups ever to find the funding they need to compete with Google," the EFF wrote.
