According to this Reuters article, Yahoo! is being sued over an incident that occurred on one of its message boards.

The plaintiff, Stephen Galton of the law firm Galton & Helm, filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court claiming that Yahoo unfairly protected people who post negative messages on its bulletin boards and falsely advertised that it prevents such abusive messages.

Galton wants to certify a class of people who: 1) have been targeted by abusive messages on a Yahoo board; 2) tried to get such messages stopped or learn the identity of the message poster; and 3) had such requests denied within the last four years.

A class action suit is not to be taken lightly -- it requires serious financial committment for the plaintiff's firm, and special sanctions become available to the defense.

If this suit goes forward, it could have a major chilling effect on other California Internet companies that provide message boards and group discussions, such as Google, Craigslist and FindLaw.

All of the aforementioned companies have established rules regulating the group discussions, however Galton's suit alleges the failure to follow the posted rules. This point is reminiscent of lessons learned during the recent Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform: It's great to self-establish rules of conduct for your organization, but you'd better be prepared to follow the standards because you will be held to them.

In light of the available facts, an interesting question is: What are Yahoo's defenses? At first glance, there seems to be a serious class commonality issue. And then there's potential First Amendment arguments. Though Yahoo is not commenting on the litigation, a settlement or a demurrer may be forthcoming from the Internet company.

For now, I close with one observation: Yahoo's allegedly incomplete responses to Galton's requests for identities of message board users could be largely due to the fact that people frequently give false information during online registration processes. As a computer-using dog in a Far Side comic once said, "No one knows you're a dog on the Internet."