The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

Incidentally, many of the communities on these under the radar, non-Craigslist sites are now bracing for the equivalent of the Eternal September, like when AOL opened up access to Usenet and an ocean of newbies destroyed the careful equilibrium of a community which the general public mostly didn't know even existed. I worked for one of the bigger sites(in the top 5), and let me tell you, the amount of traffic they all get, the number of users and the number of women posting would absolutely shock folks. The entire online prostitution industry is much, much bigger than everyone realizes. It's just all under the radar, and for good reason!

Craigslist has always been the AOL of the industry, as the lowest hanging fruit, with the most blatant crime, spam, cops and worst behaved prostitutes. But at the same time, their traffic amounts were a high multiple of everyone else combined. All the AGs have accomplished is to redirect hundreds of thousands of posts and millions of hits elsewhere on the Internet. :P

The AGs surely must be grand-standing, or else I am vastly underestimating their intelligence and understanding of how the Internet works. They surely know damned well they stand no chance of going after the dozens upon dozens of other sites out there, wrangling each one through the courts, and shutting each down one by one. All it will take is one legal fuck up in one case against one site that gets thrown out or won to set the precedent, then the flood gates open and we're all back to where we started: the general public has a fundamental base level of protected free speech online, and online prostitution continues as it always has.

Also, the AGs have just made the jobs of the cops infinitely harder to go after prostitution. This is actually a law enforcement disaster—when you can't stop all the crime, the next best hope is that you can at least have an evidence trail for the worst crimes that you must go after. It's a triage system, as applied to law enforcement. Now the cops don't even have that. Before, with CL being the hub, the cops make one phone call and get IPs, credit cards, and post history—it was a nearly automated process that would shock most people how easy it was. Now, as the user base fractures amongst sites all over the world, the cops are going to have a much harder, less user-friendly way of getting any investigative information. So when some criminal fool posts on some board that they have a basement full of 12 year old Eastern European girls chained to the wall, or whatever extravagent crime you want to imagine, the cops won't be able to hit the ground running after one phone call. It could take weeks just to locate where the poster originated.
Nice job AGs!

Not to mention that when women can't easily post online, their next best alternative is to work as street walkers, and that is a public safety disaster. You could even argue that in the past decade Craigslist has helped society by moving prostitution off the streets and onto the web.

Besides, many of the big sites are not even hosted nor incorporated in the US and are quite untouchable.

Basically it all boils down to this:

AGs: it's an election year, we need to drum up PR, sex & prostitution moves our political base, so it cannot possibly backfire, it's illegal, it has all moved to the Internet, so let's stop the Internet!

Internet: lol wut?!