This hole FOSTA-SESTA thing has really become a nuisance. When will some budding international entrepreneur create a TER clone off shore with USA reviews, ads, boards, etc.? I love my regulars but really wish to see some new ladies and will not without some trustworthy menu verification procedure. My current procedure is to see the friends of my regulars, but that  limits the pool.

So the same legal concerns they have would be a concern to someone else.  Those more familiar with the law can probably provide more details.

IMO, if the owners of another site were themselves, truly "off shore" in another country far far away from US shores, it would be *less likely* that the Feds from the US would go to the trouble to try and have them extradited to the US for prosecution.

Steph XO

I don't think it is a matter of distance.  I think it has more to do with the attitude in a given country towards this U.S. law.  Even countries with an extradition treaty with the U.S., including some of our closest allies, have refused to extradite some people the U.S. wanted.

FOSTA creates liability for US owners even if the servers are overseas like in the case of TER, so the choices for the principals are limited.  Either physically move to another country, sell the operation to someone overseas, or (and this would be my choice, and has been in the past for some of my own business enterprises)  set up ownership of TER in a jurisdiction that allows for completely anonymous ownership of a corporate entity, where it is illegal under local law for a local attorney who is the agent for the corporation to divulge who the shareholders are.   Just like in the US, courts in other countries go to great lengths to protect attorney-client, and attorney work-product privileges, and there are jurisdictions where an attorney would be disbarred if he revealed the owners (shareholders) of a corporation that was set up with anonymous ownership the the laws of THAT jurisdiction that allow anonymous ownership.  I have been taking advantage of these jurisdictions since the late 1980's.  As Steph points out, the US would have a monumental uphill battle trying to prosecute a foreign national who owned an offshore company like TER merely because the contents were accessible on the web in the US.

US owners are the problem *IF* they are caught.

Unlike most businesses, it's entire possible to run something like TER anonymously without having it based in the correct area. Hosting would have to be outside of the US because of the hosting provider's liability, but that's all really. It requires fantastically diligent opsec, because LE will be looking for you, but that does not mean it's impossible, or really what the right person would classify as 'hard'.

The only real difficult part is where to put the money, which if you force everyone to buy VIP with crypto currency that problem goes away as well, provided you can teach people how to use it well enough.  

 
All that to say, there have been people who have tried and failed to use the above model. The failure is always due to carelessness, and the perceived risk of doing so comes from a reporting bias, because you never hear about people who are doing it well.

Excellent replies. As someone who has participated in creative ownership structures (mostly in transfer pricing arena) I appreciate the anonymous ownership angle, which spurred my original post. I am curious why no one has done it yet. It seems like a real money maker for someone overseas. Maybe the money is not as big as we might think.  Gina apparently does well. But, that is probably a one-off.  

Having hobbied in legal countries, I can tell you there are plenty of entrepreneurs in the pay-for-play space.  Maybe I should contact a few of them and plant a seed. But, as someone pointed out, this may preclude them from ever traveling to the USA. Thus, my point about "maybe the money is not big enough" to justify the risk, investment, etc.

The issue is trust and utility.  

 

  TER and p411 to a different extent, had a special thing going before all this happened, because people trusted them. You don't have the benefit of a decade of good behavior going into this, so your organic growth is going to be slow no matter what you do.  
How do you get a group of women who are absolutely 100% suspicious of everything they see/hear/read to trust your platform? For starters It better be provably secure and has to offer utility that nowhere else can offer to both providers and clientele (which is not hard, given the current state of affairs). The women you really want to use the platform, and with them the clientele that will pay for access to them, are going to be slow to adopt it.  

 
  So all of that leads to the real problem in starting something like this, which is that there's a finite amount of time that you can bleed cash while you get the site into a position where it can make money. I've looked at this personally and decided that I could absolutely replace TER in feature/function/utility/security but I don't have the means to develop a site and have it hemorrhage cash for that long.