Hot Type, for the week of March 10, 2006 -- continued "No minorities," said another ad mentioned in the suit. Two more ads that were fingered said "Neighborhood is predominantly Caucasian, Polish and Hispanic" and "Within walking distance to transportation, shopping, church." Some apartment hunters would consider "Very spacious for a single person, too small for a couple" helpful; the suit considers it illegal. For my benefit, Richard Karpel, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, e-mailed member papers a questionnaire asking how they deal with fair-housing rules. "This stuff sure is scary for a small paper like ours. We have to be cautious," replied a classifieds manager in North Carolina. An ad director from Virginia said, "We are very vigilant! We are probably overly conservative." Brett Murphy, who manages classifieds for the Reader, said "We're pretty strict." What about "walking distance from church," I asked him. He replied, "I don't know if we're that strict, but if it's Boys Town we'll edit that. It has that inference 'We're only renting to gay people.' 'Urban pioneers' -- we've taken that term out." The Reader just revamped its online classifieds and now offers photos, maps, and other features in order to compete directly with Craigslist. Advertisers can post directly on the site, ads are free for private individuals, and because the definition of "private" was expanded to include sublessors and owner occupants of two-flats and three-flats, at first revenues will shrink. Yet Murphy has assigned nine ad reps to monitor the Web site and edit ads that cross the line. Craigslist doesn't assign anyone to do that. It tells users to "flag" any ads they're offended by, and if enough flags fly the ad comes down. Under this approach, an ad won't be deleted as objectionable until someone objects to it. Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, says his system works. "The lawsuit found 100 ads from over 200,000 posted [since last July]," he told me. "Most of those 100 would not strike an ordinary person as discriminatory." Before Buckmaster returned my call he went to our Web site and searched housing ads for "church" and "student." He let me know that "in five minutes time I found eight ads similar to the ones cited [in the lawsuit]. Eight out of 2,500. One that said 'across from a church' and seven that said something along the lines of 'ideal for students.' In the arcane world of fair housing, if you say 'ideal for students' it's assumed that you're speaking in code to say 'no families with children allowed.'" Buckmaster's point was that by the standards of the lawsuit, the Reader system has nothing on Craigslist. Buckmaster said Craigslist expects to defeat the suit because it's "misguided" and because "Congress recognized that Internet sites aren't the same as publishing houses or newspapers." That was the view of New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak, writing last Sunday. "A part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 said that online companies are not liable for transmitting unlawful materials supplied by others," he reported. But that was then. Today a debate rages over whether the Internet "needs protection to preserve its character as a free-wheeling, spontaneous forum" (Liptak's description) or needs to grow up. Finding Craigslist liable, a UCLA law professor told Liptak, would devastate it. Alternative papers like the Reader aren't sure what to think. There was a surge of glee when the Craigslist suit was filed -- "I was overjoyed," a publisher from another city told me -- because publishers want everyone to play by the same rules. Yet if the Internet is the new frontier, the more wide-open it stays, the greater the opportunities might be for everyone. Stephen Libowsky, an attorney representing the Lawyers' Committee, predicts the Internet won't be lawless forever. Illegal drugs, body parts, child pornography, and more are trafficked on the Internet, he says, "and inevitably Congress is going to have to deal with these questions. I don't think there will be any stomach not to deal with that." Will Congress also have the stomach to deal with fair-housing restrictions that have been the law of the land for nearly four decades? The Craigslist suit has put that question on the table. Libowsky calls the Internet the "wild west" -- and predicts that in ten years "it's unlikely it's going to be the same." It might be changing already. Liptak mentioned a 2003 suit in California that was dismissed under the 1996 law, but that same year a Web site owner in New Jersey settled in a fair-housing lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and agreed to establish a $10,000 victims fund. A dramatic test of Internet law is under way in Louisiana, where the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center filed a federal complaint naming five Web sites that had been set up to offer emergency housing to Katrina victims. The complaint cited ads that said such things as "Not racist, but white only" and "As a white couple, we would be looking for a white mother and baby." "We have two dogs in this fight," says the Reader's executive editor, Mike Lenehan, who oversees the paper's Web site. "I know a publisher who's been trying for years to figure out how to anonymously drop a dime on Craigslist for this issue. From the publishers' point of view, it's true Craigslist doesn't have to play by the same rules we do -- not so far. But we shouldn't be too eager for them to lose this suit, because we're all in the online business too." Lenehan doesn't think Craigslist will lose in court, and he doesn't think the freewheeling Internet can be throttled. "You remember when you couldn't say things like 'gay' or 'S and M' in newspaper personals?" he says. "A whole vocabulary of code words was created that were innocuous on their face but meaningful to people who needed to know about sexual practices" -- code words like "Greek culture" and "water sports." He adds, "I'm sure the online community -- as they like to call themselves -- would be very quick to come up with a solution to this problem. If not a technical solution, a poetic solution." Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2006 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.