Appeals Court Denies Safe Harbor for Roommates.com

Mariner writes "The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Roommates.com Safe Harbor status under the Communications Decency Act in a lawsuit brought by the Fair Housing Councils of San Fernando Valley and San Diego. Roommates.com was accused of helping landlords discriminate against certain kinds of tenants due to a couple of questions on the Roommates.com registration form: gender and sexual orientation. 'Though it refused to rule on whether Roommates.com actually violated the Fair Housing Act, the Court did find that it lost Section 230 immunity because it required users to enter that information in order to proceed. As Judge Alex Kozinski put it in his opinion, "if it is responsible, in whole or in part, for creating or developing the information, it becomes a content provider and is not entitled to CDA immunity."'"

Comments

Re:Umm, why is that bad?

[Logic and Reason]

Is this racist?

More importantly, does it matter? Why should we care if some landlord (or business owner in general) is racist?

"Oh, but the poor Asians won't have anywhere to live!" Yeah, right. Even if the vast majority of landlords were biased against (say) Asians, all it takes is one unbiased landlord to make a killing by catering to a vastly under-served market. Then the biased landlords either lose out on much potential profit, or they throw away their biases in order to compete.

Interestingly, many people are convinced that businesses will do absolutely anything to make a buck, yet somehow have no problem believing that those same businesses would throw away absurd amounts of potential revenue due to racism or other prejudice. Even if a business were willing to shoot itself in the foot like that, other businesses would simply prosper more and eventually replace the prejudiced business.

All of this assumes, of course, that the prejudices in question are not justified. If one of them is, though, what business does the government have stepping in? In your example, if 99% of the landlord's Asian renters do, in fact, mess up his drains, isn't it completely reasonable for him to be wary of renting to other Asians?

Re:Look, I just wanted a normal male roommate

[Plutonite]

Wow. You've researched it out pretty nicely, haven't you? Your knowledge of the population densities for various categories of freaks astounds me, but I think vegan socialist womyn are hard to find *anywhere*, except maybe North Korea and Argentina.

No, I'm not serious.