CEI’s Eli Lehrer weighs in on the lawsuit against eHarmony, the just-for-straights dating site which claims its elaborate matchmaking algorithm just wasn’t designed with gay couples in mind. He writes:
It strikes me that there’s an even broader point: A great many of the costs of discrimination exist because it takes place in the physical world. Colin Powell, famously, could not find a place to stay or even use the bathroom when he traveled through the Jim Crow-era South.
As a general point, I think this is a little too quick. Yes, the Internet lacks the element of physical scarcity that made official discrimination such a pressing problem, as illustrated in the example above. But many Web sites are network goods (in the economic as well as technical sense), such that their utility is a function of large numbers of people converging on a few big ones. Facebook or MySpace or LastFM are useful to the extent that lots of other people you know are all on the same site, and while in principle anyone could start a competing equivalent, there’s an element of lock-in if we assume people aren’t disposed to switch frequently. (Though, on the other hand, the speed with which Friendster yielded pride of place to MySpace, which in turn has been largely supplanted by Facebook, suggests this isn’t an insuperable barrier.)
Still, with respect to dating sites, the argument seems pretty strong. It’s not ultimately that big a burden to be relegated to a “separate but equal” alternative when the whole point of the site is presumably that you’re looking specifically to get matched up with other gay people. Arguably, this ends up constituting a sort of benefit, since you know that’s one fewer site you need to join to be assured access to the largest pool of potential partners. And, indeed, there are quite a lot of specifically gay dating sites that, as far as I’m aware, have not been the target of lawsuits by excluded straights. So even if you aren’t of the view that site owners should generally be allowed to limit access to their services as they see fit, the suit here does seem pointlessly symbolic.
Update: Eli’s colleague Richard Morrison has more.
