The Ads Discriminate, but Does the Web
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THE Internet is, in many ways and by design, a lawless place. If this newspaper were to publish a classified advertisement for an apartment rental that said, say, ”African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won’t work out,” it would be liable for housing discrimination under the federal Fair Housing Act. Yet Craigslist.org, the enormous online forum, posted that very ad in July, and most legal experts say, as the law stands today, Craigslist bears no responsibility for it. That is the result of a social bargain made 10 years ago, meant to nurture what was then a strange and nascent thing called the Internet. A part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 said that online companies are not liable for transmitting unlawful materials supplied by others. Now that the Internet is more mature, some legal experts say, it may be time to re-examine that bargain, and to ask some fundamental questions. Are online companies common carriers, like the phone company or FedEx, and so not responsible for the content of what they transmit? Or are they like newspapers and magazines, which are held accountable for publishing advertising they had no part in creating? Does it make sense to allow lawsuits against this newspaper for the letters to the editor in this section but not for postings from readers on the paper’s Web site? A lawsuit against Craigslist filed by a Chicago fair-housing group last month, over the ”clash with me” ad and more than 100 others, asks those questions. Court decisions so far have almost universally rejected claims against online companies that publish others’ speech. Internet companies have been held immune from suits for libel, invasion of privacy, fraud, breach of contract and housing discrimination. That means Amazon cannot be sued for its users’ millions of reviews of the books and other products it sells. America Online is not responsible for the six million new entries posted on its message boards each month. EBay is not liable for damaging statements among the more than 2.4 billion feedback comments its members have posted. And search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo do not have to worry about the billions of Web pages they make available to their users. More : query.nytimes.com |