The Times: Op-ed - Why Microsoft is really giving up on chatrooms
Bill Gates gets no ker-ching ker-ching from chat. By David Rowan
Bill Gates has always been a charitable kind of guy - giving away £100 million here to wipe out malaria, £70 million there to combat Aids. So naturally, as a responsible father of three, Bill's late-night instant messages to his wife, Melinda, have lately been fired with concern for the safety of innocent children. With paedophiles lurking behind every mouse-click, an altruist as public-spirited as Gates saw no alternative but to disconnect Microsoft's internet chatrooms. No matter that 1.2 million British consumers might now defect to less principled rivals: its MSN network simply had to act "to help safeguard the children".
Well, LOL!!, as they say in Bill's chatrooms - you might as well Laugh Out Loud at the man's sheer audacity. Microsoft, never known for putting public interest before profits, had some far more pragmatic reasons for announcing its chatroom closures. The fact that it garnered millions of £worth of largely uncritical newspaper coverage in the process is merely an added bonus for this most single-mindedly revenue-driven of corporations.
Chatrooms do not generate much revenue - particularly, as with MSN's, they are mostly free to consumers. In those linguistically distorted bubble days when "monetising eyeballs" was all that mattered, a website's "traffic" was an automatic determinant of value. Today, traffic counts only if advertisers or users are prepared to pay. And in MSN's case, the cash has not been flowing quickly enough.
Besides, those pesky regulators have once again come knocking at Microsoft's door - in this case, the Home Office, keen to enforce chatroom guidelines designed to give children greater protection. And if that will cost money, so will the potential flood of legal claims for negligence. Far cheaper in the long run, surely, to let teenagers take their idle chat to the smaller websites - even if these sites, unlike Microsoft, could never afford to employ that expensive chat-monitoring hardware known as human beings.
This is not to deny the seriousness of the risks facing children on the net. There have been at least 15 cases in Britain of children being physically attacked by a man they first met in a chatroom. Academic studies have painted depressingly detailed pictures of paedophiles' cynical strategies for grooming children, first flattering them, then isolating them, and finally gaining their trust to arrange a private meeting.
Yet none of this is news to Microsoft. If it felt so concerned "to prioritise the safety of children", as this week's press release declared, why did it not close its chatrooms three years ago, when Kenneth Lockley, of Derby, was jailed after going online in search of an underage sexual encounter? Why did it not act when Patrick Green was jailed at Aylesbury Crown Court in 2000 after meeting a 15-year-old girl he met in a Yahoo! chatroom? Why was it so inactive when the Western Mail exposed the dangers of its own MSN chatrooms, where a reporter posing as a 12-year-old girl was bombarded with adult requests to meet or engage in phone sex?
The company's answer then was that it was "not directly responsible for user-created chat", merely its facilitator. Don't bother asking why Microsoft chose not to "facilitate" the provision of enough chatroom moderators to ensure children's safety.
Incidentally, the day after the chatrooms are withdrawn next month, Microsoft's increasingly dominant instant messaging service will shut out rival firms' software. Now, wouldn't it be convenient if exiled chatters found that this provided an alternative and helped Microsoft to push AOL aside?
The author is The Times's technology columnist
(The Times, Comment page, September 25 2003)
Bill Gates has always been a charitable kind of guy - giving away £100 million here to wipe out malaria, £70 million there to combat Aids. So naturally, as a responsible father of three, Bill's late-night instant messages to his wife, Melinda, have lately been fired with concern for the safety of innocent children. With paedophiles lurking behind every mouse-click, an altruist as public-spirited as Gates saw no alternative but to disconnect Microsoft's internet chatrooms. No matter that 1.2 million British consumers might now defect to less principled rivals: its MSN network simply had to act "to help safeguard the children".
Well, LOL!!, as they say in Bill's chatrooms - you might as well Laugh Out Loud at the man's sheer audacity. Microsoft, never known for putting public interest before profits, had some far more pragmatic reasons for announcing its chatroom closures. The fact that it garnered millions of £worth of largely uncritical newspaper coverage in the process is merely an added bonus for this most single-mindedly revenue-driven of corporations.
Chatrooms do not generate much revenue - particularly, as with MSN's, they are mostly free to consumers. In those linguistically distorted bubble days when "monetising eyeballs" was all that mattered, a website's "traffic" was an automatic determinant of value. Today, traffic counts only if advertisers or users are prepared to pay. And in MSN's case, the cash has not been flowing quickly enough.
Besides, those pesky regulators have once again come knocking at Microsoft's door - in this case, the Home Office, keen to enforce chatroom guidelines designed to give children greater protection. And if that will cost money, so will the potential flood of legal claims for negligence. Far cheaper in the long run, surely, to let teenagers take their idle chat to the smaller websites - even if these sites, unlike Microsoft, could never afford to employ that expensive chat-monitoring hardware known as human beings.
This is not to deny the seriousness of the risks facing children on the net. There have been at least 15 cases in Britain of children being physically attacked by a man they first met in a chatroom. Academic studies have painted depressingly detailed pictures of paedophiles' cynical strategies for grooming children, first flattering them, then isolating them, and finally gaining their trust to arrange a private meeting.
Yet none of this is news to Microsoft. If it felt so concerned "to prioritise the safety of children", as this week's press release declared, why did it not close its chatrooms three years ago, when Kenneth Lockley, of Derby, was jailed after going online in search of an underage sexual encounter? Why did it not act when Patrick Green was jailed at Aylesbury Crown Court in 2000 after meeting a 15-year-old girl he met in a Yahoo! chatroom? Why was it so inactive when the Western Mail exposed the dangers of its own MSN chatrooms, where a reporter posing as a 12-year-old girl was bombarded with adult requests to meet or engage in phone sex?
The company's answer then was that it was "not directly responsible for user-created chat", merely its facilitator. Don't bother asking why Microsoft chose not to "facilitate" the provision of enough chatroom moderators to ensure children's safety.
Incidentally, the day after the chatrooms are withdrawn next month, Microsoft's increasingly dominant instant messaging service will shut out rival firms' software. Now, wouldn't it be convenient if exiled chatters found that this provided an alternative and helped Microsoft to push AOL aside?
The author is The Times's technology columnist
(The Times, Comment page, September 25 2003)
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