Comment Articles

Microsoft: Doing it for the kids?

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 24 Sep 2003 15:55 BST

Closing its free chat services will do nothing to stop abuse. If anything, it will encourage people to seek out the uncontrolled and uncontrollable options of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or the myriad other systems that have, do and always will exist. I can and have run various multi-user chat systems on my broadband-connected PC; these can easily support tens or hundreds of users, and be configured to run through most firewalls. In short, chatrooms will be with us forever, and they can be entirely uncontrolled.

Responsible parents and others cannot hope to stop them. Nor should they: online communication can be enormous fun to explore and encourages some great friendships in what can be a very safe and non-threatening way. As in the real world, us adults have to do our bit to guard the places children play -- to tell the little darlings to sit down, shut up and not touch the keyboard is a piece of Victorian authoritarianism both damaging and ineffective. A balanced approach would be for chatroom providers to provide the tools for watching children's areas online and for parents to use them.

By recognising the problem yet abdicating all responsibility for it, Microsoft is doing no good for anybody but its accountants -- and to disguise such activities as ivory mansions of rectitude built on the sunniest of moral high ground is really going some, even for our favourite monopolist Those childrens' charities who applaud Microsoft's decision betray their lack of knowledge of the situation: yes, it would be nice for all those nasty people to go away and the online conduits closed that linked them to our precious offspring. It would also be nice if violent, alcoholic parents gave up the booze and the battering, but nobody's suggesting that pious good wishes are of any help there. Nor are they in chatrooms.

The answer is not to abandon online services that are in some way difficult or controversial, but to strive to make them better. Passing off cost-cutting as principled action shows Microsoft is neither willing nor able to show leadership in the online world, and that the principle closest to its corporate heart is the bottom line.