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Microsoft: Doing it for the kids?

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 24 Sep 2003 15:55 BST

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality, said the first Lord Macauly in 1830. If he'd stayed around for another couple of centuries, he'd have had the immense pleasure of being roundly trumped. Today, we have the joy of Microsoft lecturing us about corporate responsibility. Because chatrooms are the haunts of perverts and spammers, the company says, it is going to close those free areas on MSN.

For Microsoft, this is an excellent move. Running chatrooms costs money, and if you charge for the pleasure then your users go elsewhere. By shutting these services down with a cry of "Think of the children!", the company saves dosh and looks respectable. It can also wag its finger at its most hated online enemy, AOL, for continuing with its chatrooms, and get acres of free publicity that doesn't revolve around the company being in court. Rarely can a company have publicly disowned part of its long-term business plan to such good effect.

It's not such a good move for the children that Microsoft is so ostentatiously protecting. It's most certainly true that online anonymous discussion areas are often thoroughly unpleasant places: if you ever find yourself fondly imagining that racism and anti-Semitism are endangered species, just wander into a UK chatroom and pretend you're from, say, Nigeria and planning to live in Britain. It's interesting from an anthropological point of view -- why can't white supremacists spell? -- but hardly a nurturing environment for the young. That's before the paedophiles and porn merchants start up, as well as the other online scam merchants that anyone who's ever chatted will know only too well.

But Microsoft's shocked, I tell you, shocked response to finding bad behaviour in its club is merely to throw everyone out onto the street. If the company wants to take the moral lead on this, then fine: it can create moderated, controlled chatrooms for children and ensure they're safe and enjoyable. It can monitor the traffic and work with authorities when crimes are committed: Operation Avalanche in the US generated seven thousand names of UK subscribers to child pornography by watching chatrooms, among other intelligence, and this is the sort of information Microsoft could easily be generating. It chooses not to. If it can't make money at it, it prefers to walk away.