Google has asked California's Sixth District Court of Appeal for a writ of mandate overturning a Santa Clara Superior Court ruling that let an age-discrimination class action against its advertising platform proceed. The underlying case, Haynie v. Google (No. 24CV446330), was filed by Richard Haynie, then 66, and Constance Galloway, then 63, who allege Google's ad platform let advertisers in insurance, banking, and financial services exclude older users from seeing their ads — a practice they say violates California's Unruh Civil Rights Act (Cal. Civ. Code § 51). Judge Beth McGowen rejected Google's motion to dismiss on Section 230 grounds in June 2026, allowing the suit to move forward. Google is now trying to get that decision reversed before the case reaches discovery and trial.
The Steelman: Why the Unruh Claim Isn't Frivolous
The plaintiffs' theory deserves to be stated plainly before it's dismissed. Age discrimination in access to commercial opportunity is a real and recognized harm — the Unruh Act has long been read by California courts to reach discrimination beyond its enumerated categories when conduct is "arbitrary, invidious, or unreasonable," a standard the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) itself cites from Javorsky v. Western Athletic Clubs (2015) in its own amicus brief. If an advertiser can systematically hide job postings, credit offers, or insurance products from people over 60, that is a plausible harm regardless of which company built the targeting tool. Plaintiffs argue Google isn't just hosting a third party's discriminatory ad copy — it built and sold the age-exclusion feature advertisers used, which starts to look like Google's own conduct rather than someone else's content.
Google's Section 230 Argument
Google's defense rests on the core of 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1): a platform cannot be "treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Google's position is that the advertisers, not Google, chose to exclude older users, and that a demographic targeting menu is a neutral tool — the same argument that carried the day for most of Craigslist's functionality in Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.Com (521 F.3d 1157, 9th Cir. 2008), even though that case famously stripped immunity from the one feature (a discriminatory questionnaire) the Ninth Circuit found Roommates.com had itself "developed." ICLE's brief leans on that same precedent to argue neutral targeting tools shouldn't forfeit immunity just because a third party misuses them.
That distinction is exactly the fight McGowen's ruling reopens: is an ad-targeting checkbox more like Roommates.com's neutral search filters, or more like its discriminatory questionnaire? McGowen sided with the plaintiffs' framing. Google says that gets the line wrong and, more urgently, that being forced to litigate the merits before that legal question is resolved defeats the point of Section 230 immunity, which the statute is meant to confer from suit, not merely from ultimate liability.
Why the Amici Are Right to Worry
The timing sharpens the stakes. On August 18, 2026, the Ninth Circuit ruled in California v. Meta that a district court's denial of Section 230 immunity is not immediately appealable in federal court — meaning platforms increasingly have to fight expensive suits through discovery before any appellate court weighs in on immunity at all, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned the same week. Google's writ of mandate is precisely the state-court analog of trying to avoid that trap: a pretrial mechanism to get appellate review of a Section 230 denial before years of costly litigation, rather than after. NetChoice's amicus letter backing the petition makes the practical case directly, arguing that showing an AARP ad to seniors or a student-loan ad to twenty-somethings is ordinary, protected audience-relevance targeting, not "invidious discrimination" under the Unruh Act — and that treating it as such would expose ordinary marketing practices to civil-rights liability nationwide, given California's outsized role in setting de facto national ad-tech norms. Trade groups including the Association of National Advertisers, the American Advertising Federation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Digital Advertising Alliance filed similar letters, warning the ruling could chill standard demographic targeting well beyond Google.
That warning is the strongest part of Google's case, and it's not really about Google at all. If a state trial court's Unruh Act theory survives, every ad platform that lets advertisers pick an audience by age faces the same exposure — a rule that would push platforms toward less relevant advertising for everyone, including the older users the suit is nominally trying to protect, since "neutral" targeting is often how vulnerable groups get shown ads for products actually suited to them (Medicare plans, senior discounts) rather than being flooded with irrelevant ones.
None of this means age-based exclusion from opportunity ads (credit, housing, employment) should get a free pass — federal fair-lending and fair-housing law already restrict discriminatory targeting in those specific categories, and Google's own ad policies bar it. But the Unruh Act claim here sweeps more broadly, treating Google's targeting infrastructure itself as the discriminatory act. The Sixth District should grant the writ, not because platforms deserve blanket immunity, but because a menu option built for lawful uses shouldn't strip a company of Section 230's core protection over how third parties chose to use it — and because forcing that question to be litigated for years before anyone answers it undermines the exact purpose Congress wrote Section 230 to serve.