About morals or money?

Sep 24th 2003

Microsoft has announced that it is shutting its internet chat room service in all but a
handful of countries. The software giant says it is acting because it is impossible to
protect children from paedophiles, and users in general from pornographic junk mail. But
some suspect that Microsoft’s motives are more commercial than moral

IN JULY, Shevaun Pennington, a 12-year-old English schoolgirl, ran away with an American ex-
Marine almost three times her age, whom she had met through an internet chat room. Until the
pair were tracked down alive and well in Germany a few days later, the police were deeply
concerned for the girl’s safety. The episode encapsulates just why parents in Britain—and the
government—seem to equate “chat room” with “paedophilia”. And it explains why children’s
charities and the government have welcomed Microsoft’s decision to shut down its chat room
services in Britain and 27 other countries around the world. Microsoft said it has taken this action
to “better protect children from inappropriate communication online”. In particular, the software
giant has highlighted the twin scourges of paedophiles using the internet to “groom” youngsters
for sex, and the attempts by “spammers” to use chat rooms to direct unsuspecting users to
pornographic websites.

However, some suspect that Microsoft’s real motives are commercial. The popularity of chat
rooms makes them costly to run. Microsoft plans to maintain subscription-only chat rooms in a
handful of countries. It will also redirect disenchanted chatters to its instant messaging service,
MSN Messenger; though free, this may offer the company more fruitful marketing opportunities.
Moreover, the prevalence of spam tarnishes Microsoft’s already spotty reputation for online
security. The company may fear litigation from distressed parents if it does nothing to curb the
problem.

The concerns about “inappropriate” uses of the internet—and particularly chat rooms, in which
users can participate anonymously—are quite real. One British organisation, the Children’s
Charities Coalition for Internet Safety, says that at least 26 cases of child rape or abduction have
been linked to chat rooms. The coalition described Microsoft’s move as “momentous”. The British
government has announced plans to make it a criminal offence to groom a child for sex using the
internet.

But others are more sceptical about Microsoft’s shutdown. Some children’s campaigners argue
that the move could be counter-productive. Children who already have dubious internet “friends”
may be tempted to reveal their mobile-phone numbers or e-mail addresses. Others may simply
move to other chat room providers, such as AOL and Yahoo!.

Is Microsoft really motivated mainly by commercial considerations? Those who think so point to
the inconsistency of closing down in some countries while moving to a subscription model in
others. Microsoft will continue to offer chat rooms for those willing to pay in America, Canada,
Japan, Brazil and New Zealand. The service will not be moderated in America, where Microsoft
has 8.6m subscribers to its internet service, though the company will ask users to sign up to
terms of use. Users will also be able to sign up to an unmoderated service in both Canada and
Japan. Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, an independent research house, told
Associated Press: “Fundamentally, I believe this is a move to make MSN more profitable. It will
allow the company to get rid of some infrastructure that was supporting chat, and to make more
money on what it leaves in place.” Microsoft says that use of its chat rooms is on the decline in
any event, because users are migrating to messaging services, even though these are plagued
by spam “pop-ups”.

It may also be that Microsoft now sees chat rooms, with all their attendant negative publicity, as a
legal liability. Given the lengths to which American tort law has been stretched in recent years, it
is not hard to imagine distressed parents claiming that Microsoft was to blame for a paedophile
preying on their daughter in its chat rooms.

Further, the pornographic e-mails that clog up chat rooms are further denting Microsoft’s
reputation for software security. This reputation has been mauled in the past few months by
computer worms and viruses, such as Sobig.F, Blaster, Nachi and Welchi. The dominance of
Microsoft’s Windows operating system means it is the preferred target of hackers.

Anti-social uses of the internet are a growing concern for governments as well as for businesses
and parents. After the September 11th attacks, countries around the world swiftly enacted
legislation requiring internet companies to keep tabs on users. (It is thought that the attacks were
in large part co-ordinated and financed with the help of the internet.) And this week, the California
state legislature introduced a groundbreaking law that bans spamming: anyone who sends
unsolicited e-mails to anyone else in the state will now be acting illegally. Given the size of
California and its residents’ love of computers, this could affect a fifth of all American e-mail
traffic. But, as this legislation and Microsoft’s chat room U-turn both show, the battle over internet
security is far from finished.