The law may temper the freewheeling nature of the Internet after all.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided Thursday that a website may be found liable for violating fair housing laws by matching roommates according to gender, sexual orientation and parenthood.
Federal law protecting websites "was not meant to create a lawless, no-man's land on the Internet," the court in San Francisco said in an 8-3 ruling.
The judges said a site called Roommates.com may be brought to trial for possibly violating anti-discrimination laws because it requires users to provide information about gender, sexual orientation and whether they have children, and then uses the information to screen people for matches.
"A real estate broker may not inquire as to the race of a prospective buyer, and an employer may not inquire as to the religion of a prospective employee," Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote for the majority. "If such questions are unlawful when posed face-to-face by telephone, they don't magically become lawful when asked electronically online."
The ruling dealt a major blow to the immunity shield that federal law has provided to nurture Internet expansion. Lawyers in the case said the trend in federal courts had been to protect websites from liability.
The three judges who dissented called the ruling an "unprecedented expansion of liability" that could chill the Internet's growth. They said the decision was at odds with rulings by five other federal appeals courts and threatened protections for all interactive sites.
Only three weeks ago, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago rejected a similar fair housing challenge to classified advertising site Craigslist.
The decision "will make it exceedingly difficult for website providers to know whether their activities will be considered immune" under federal law, Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote for the dissenters.
But Thursday's majority said Roommates.com differed from the other sites because it was not a mere passive conduit of information. Site users are required to select from drop-down menus whether they want to live with "straight or gay" males, only with "straight" males, only with "gay" males or with "no males," the court said.
"Roommate makes answering the discriminatory questions a condition of doing business," Kozinski said. The singular form, Roommate.com, is the legal name for the site Roommates.com
