Of Craigslist and Profanity

If you have been following the news in the last few months, there was a big uproar about the news of the secret craigslist stalker (on of course craigslist.com). It was rumored that the person behind the postings was luring young women via dubious worded postings and services on craigslist and subsequently robbing and/or murdering them. We also heard that there was a suspect who was caught by law enforcement authorities who maintained his innocence throughout the investigation and later on went on to commit suicide while in custody, just about a month ago in August 2010. After a lot of drama, craigslist finally decided to pull the plug on Adult services permanently under pressure from law enforcement agencies just before Labor Day.
Now although I think that an 'adult services' section should have never been present on a publicly available domain like craigslist.com, I have a comment to make. Mainly because the very nature of the crimes while gory and hideous, were based on a very popular 'online' service available on the Internet, viz. craigslist.com. And since this blog is about all things digital--Internet being the epitome of which, it is relevant material for us to talk about.
My comment is this--the beauty of the Internet is that its owned by no one. Then the bane of Internet is also that it is owned by no one. There is no one regulatory organization or government that can define what content is posted on the Internet. Really speaking the Internet is self governed. Now in that sense, the judgment of the netizens is extremely important. I think it is a shame that in cases like this, the law-enforcement is compelled to step in to 'manage' the Internet; when in reality, such a situation should not even arise. Consider this, how about some judgment on part of the domain owners (in this case craigslist.com) to have benchmarks and rules in terms of what kind of content are allowed on their website. We all know, personal issues and content like religion, adult content, foul language, terrorism etc are somethings that can easily rile up people. So why does that sort of content have to be allowed on public domains like craigslist in the first place? Some will argue that it is upto the content users ie users of craigslist in this case, to exhibit restraint and refrain from getting into traps like these. I think that argument is less effective in practice and it is better to have content-control at the source. In other words, if the site maintainers have strict guidelines about the type of content they will allow on their site and then enforce it strictly, such a fiasco would not arise.
Anyway better late than never, I think the removal of adult content on craigslist is a welcome change. And I hope that content providers elsewhere (like youtube, facebook, twitter etc) are watching out and learning their lessons.