En Banc Court Puts Roommates.com on the Hook in Fair Housing Suit
An en banc 9th Circuit has ruled that a website can be held liable for violating fair housing laws.
The ruling by 11 judges of the San Francisco-based court found that Roommates.com can be sued for violating federal fair housing laws because it requires users to provide information that individuals would be barred from seeking in person or over the phone, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Roommates.com is a national roommate matching service.
Writing for the majority, Chief Judge Alex Kozinkski distinguished between websites that post unsolicited information and those who ask users to provide information. Asking for information that could foster discrimination may violate the law, the court said.
“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,” Kozinski opined (PDF) in the 8-3 decision. “If such questions are unlawful when posed face-to-face or by telephone, they don’t magically become lawful when asked electronically online.”
The ruling, the times notes, limits protection under the Communications Decency Act, which Kozinski wrote “was not meant to create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet.”
The court went on to note that dating and other similar websites would be protected under the act, so long as they did not require discriminatory information.
“A dating website that requires users to enter their sex, race, religion and marital status through drop-down menus, and that provides means for users to search along the same lines, retains its … immunity insofar as it does not contribute to any alleged illegality,” the court majority said.
“If an individual uses an ordinary search engine to query for a ‘white roommate,’ the search engine has not contributed to any alleged unlawfulness in the individual’s conduct. A dating website that requires users to enter their sex, race, religion and marital status through drop-down menus, and that provides means for users to search along the same lines, retains its CDA immunity insofar as it does not contribute to any alleged illegality,” the majority ruled.
Judge M. Margaret McKeown dissented and warned that the ruling could undermine the growth of the Internet.
“The majority’s unprecedented expansion of liability for Internet service providers threatens to chill the robust development of the Internet that Congress envisioned,” McKeown wrote.
