Court Upholds City's Decision To Fire Employee For Web Browsing

It's official: Surfing the web while at work is enough to get you fired, at least in New York.

A Manhattan court ruled this month to uphold a decision by New York City's schools chancellor, Joel Klein, to fire an employee in 2006 for excessive web browsing.

The employee, Toquir Choudhri, was an associate education analyst employed by the Department of Education's Division of Human Resources. After he had been warned about too much web surfing, an internal audit caught Mr. Choudhri visiting over 300 Web sites in six days, with court papers citing examples such as lonelyplanet.com, chinaadviser.com, escapeartist.com, and islandsun.com.

An administrative court had previously recommended a mere reprimand of Mr. Choudhri in 2006, citing the fact that "the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper." Mr. Klein disagreed, choosing to fire the employee instead.

The First Department, Manhattan's state appellate court, upheld Mr. Klein's decision earlier this month.