It strikes me that one fallout from the US Government becoming aggressive in taking down legitimate sites (in one way or another), is that it's going to massively drive up the cost of what services charge.
One way to deter phishing forms, for example, is to charge enough for your service that it makes it very unlikely someone would use you for that. Jot mentions having taken down 65,000 phishing forms in the past year; charge $10 or $20 (or whatever, enough to wipe out the issue) upfront for each of those and that problem disappears instantly.
It's the difference between MegaUpload and DropBox fundamentally in how they deter piracy (or don't); applied to every web service.
Most of the time, when the government gets involved, the cost of a service or product skyrockets. They generate inflated costs either through monetization (eg education costs), or through regulation & compliance nightmares.
The government might just force a transition from the so called free web, to a nearly all paid services web. It would form a 'cost wall' that keeps a lot of the abuse users out.
If JotForms charged $10 to $20 no one would use them. A competitor with more thoughtful plans for discouraging phishing would wipe them out. I imagine most of these forms could be automatically detected.
We are talking about phishing here. Don't you think they have access to a lot of recently-phished credit cards they could use to buy the forms? They would probably choose for a free competitor most likely since that is easier to automate and you don't need the hassle to try out the credit cards. I'm pretty sure web hosting companies already get a lot of phishers paying for an account with a phished credit card, though.
By the way, the scammers on dating sites use a lot of paid accounts (and pay for them themselves most likely) considering they get a lot more money out of it and a paid account seems more legitimate. Just to say that making something paid does not necessarily remove all the abuse.
Methods of abuse never stop evolving so long as there's a free product available to attempt to hijack. The problem won't stop being persistent, and the government is only going to get more frequent in their take-downs. Switching from innocent until proven guilty, to guilty until lucky if you can even defend yourself, will eventually make it very dangerous to open yourself up via free services.
Worse, if the government keeps lowering the bar on qualification for shutdown, the margin for mistake will be so small that the best effort possible won't be good enough. There will be mistakes, fraud will slip through, and boom you're toast.
If the Feds keep going in this direction, at some point the risk of a free system will not outweigh the benefit. Before 2012 is over, there will be enough of these examples to start scaring the hell out of the average web service - if we're not there already.
Government enforcement of policies like this rely on scaring large numbers of operators through a small number of intense persecutions. It works unfortunately.
It's also likely that businesses will reconsider outsourcing essential parts of their web infrastructure, such as forms, to third party providers. They'll be more likely to hire a web developer to implement data collection on their own servers, which would ensure that their business won't be impacted by someone else's domain being taken down (for valid or invalid reasons). Bad news for JotForm, but maybe good news for independent web developers.
And really bad news for the economy overall as we now invest our time and money in building 1000 crappy, redundant, bespoke copies instead of using one of a few really good ones like Wufoo and spending our time on building new things that improve the state of things. Feudalism might keep everyone employed, but it's generally not good for much else.
The downside being a "drive-by" comment, user posting, legitimate download (and one that later turns out to have some subtly questionable copyright parentage) or other detail that triggers a take-down your primary domain.
One way to deter phishing forms, for example, is to charge enough for your service that it makes it very unlikely someone would use you for that. Jot mentions having taken down 65,000 phishing forms in the past year; charge $10 or $20 (or whatever, enough to wipe out the issue) upfront for each of those and that problem disappears instantly.
It's the difference between MegaUpload and DropBox fundamentally in how they deter piracy (or don't); applied to every web service.
Most of the time, when the government gets involved, the cost of a service or product skyrockets. They generate inflated costs either through monetization (eg education costs), or through regulation & compliance nightmares.
The government might just force a transition from the so called free web, to a nearly all paid services web. It would form a 'cost wall' that keeps a lot of the abuse users out.