Are there civil rights in cyberspace? Internet sites can legally post discriminatory, false, or libelous information from users. Is it time to better police the Web?

• Author: Liptak, Adam
• Position: NATIONAL

You can find ads for just about anything on Craigslist, an enormous online forum where people post classifieds for everything from garage sales and concert tickets, to job openings and lost dogs. Last July, Craigslist ran an ad for an apartment rental in Chicago that included the following statement: "African-Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out."

If that ad sounds discriminatory to you, you're not alone. Had The New York Times or any other newspaper or magazine published that ad, it would be open to charges of housing discrimination under the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibits making housing less accessible to anyone because of their race, gender, or religion.

Yet as the law stands today, according to most legal experts, Craigslist bears no responsibility for what this ad, or others like it, say.

That is the result of a social bargain made 10 years ago, meant to nurture what was then still a strange, fledgling thing called the Internet: Part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 said that online companies are not liable for transmitting unlawful materials supplied by others.

AMAZON, EBAY & GOOGLE

Now that the Internet has become so integral to life and commerce, is it time to re-examine that bargain? A lawsuit against Craigslist filed by a Chicago fair-housing group in February, citing the "clash with me" ad and more than 100 others, asks that question.

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 6 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 that they will be held accountable for the billions of Web pages they make available to their users.

The issue in the current debate is whether online companies should continue to be treated as "common carriers," like FedEx or the phone company, which are not considered responsible for the content of what they transmit. (You can't sue the telephone company because someone called up all your...