Monday, October 20, 2003		Feature

Gates shuttering down chatroom irks Netizens
Aditya Rishi

SOME time ago, the police had cracked down on all discotheques and pool joints in Chandigarh because these were allegedly frequented by pimps and drug peddlers. How did shutting down these joints put a lid on these illegal activities, the police could never tell. Now Microsoft has closed down the Internet chatrooms run by its MSN online service in a few select countries "to deter child abusers and junk-mail peddlers." Maybe, that’s Microsoft’s idea of "policing".

Post October 14, all MSN chatrooms are open only for paid subscribers to discourage the non-paying riff-raff responsible for a growing stack of complaints, mainly for unsolicited cyber-sexual advances. In place of chat, Microsoft has been promoting Instant Messenger (IM) service in which it competes with AOL, Yahoo! and ICQ.

Agreed. New security hurdles must be addressed to prevent cyber attacks and child abuse but must you tear down chat? Short of hiring hitmen for killing spammers, Microsoft will do anything to stop them. The Internet was built by expanding beyond the original intent, but someone is now striving to hold it back. The decision will determine the future growth of the Internet. Why would anyone shutter popular chatrooms if it was not losing money.

Anti-paedophile camp has welcomed Microsoft’s planned shutdown of its chatrooms in 24 countries, but younger Web surfers may use less safe sites elsewhere.

Microsoft has shown unwillingness to moderate chatrooms properly. The real reason why the software giant has taken this step is said to be the bottomline pressures. Microsoft is focussed only on dollars and refuses to accept the added costs of policing and sanitise a non-earning member of its club, while the other chatroom operators say that it is possible to moderate the Internet chat and that too without losing money.

Rivals AOL Freeserve and Yahoo! said the Microsoft decision had no bearing on their chat services. "All MSN is doing is sending chatrooms underground," a Freeserve spokesman had said soon after Gates had announced his intent. In this country, Indiatimes and Rediff are more popular chats than the MSN.

Representatives of Microsoft say that these chatrooms had become a haven for peddlers of junk "spam" e-mail and paedophiles (child abusers). Limiting the opening hours of chatrooms could have stopped paedophiles from using these as hunting grounds. Europe’s leading Internet access provider, Germany-based T-Online, kicks out anyone reported to have made remarks of a paedophile nature in any chatroom.

Unsolicited e-mails account for a third of the mail traffic on the Internet and have become a headache for everyone. The USA has been asking its corporate marketers to abide by tough marketing guidelines that call for ending junk mail. Spam is indeed killing the potential of e-mail marketing and bulk e-mailers are devising new ways of bypassing filtering programs, but isn’t updated software a better answer?

A recent lawsuit holding Microsoft responsible for security gaps in its products has forced Microsoft to ‘make security a priority.’ Microsoft says while it can monitor paid users in chatrooms across the USA and Japan, whose billing accounts are with the company, it cannot do so for the rest of the world, barring Israel and Brazil.

Kunal Sareen, 23, a cyber junkie, compulsive chatter and computer programmer, says: "Shutting down chatrooms by Microsoft will only make users like me to shift to other chat sites like Lycos and Yahoo!. Microsoft harbours a false notion that by doing so, it can control spamming, because spammers get e-mail ID from promotional sites or forwarded e-mails. On chat, we are behind a veil of nicknames.

"Microsoft has done this to save revenue and earn goodwill. More than half the Indian population is still alien to the Internet, so it sounds irrational that Microsoft will stop something which doesn’t exist here."

Dikshit Chhabra, a businessman, says: "Microsoft is not the only chat service around the world." — a view endoresed by Amanpreet Kaur, a computer science teacher — who says, "However, I welcome this move from an MNC, as it will go a long way in curbing child pornography."

Kalpa, an IT consultant, says the company decision is fair because it too is looking for profits and not welfare, even though shutting chatrooms will force her to make new chat accounts. Harish Kumar, a management professional, however, calls the Microsoft claim on keeping paedophiles at bay a ‘publicity stunt.’

When asked how will it affect them if all their chat and messenger accounts were closed, Kunal said: "It will be like moving backwards from where we started: from e-mail to chat, from chat to instant messaging, and from IM to SMS." "It will be inconvenient for me," says Harish. That’s what chat has become: from a leisurely pastime to "convenience", and that’s where Bill Gates has hit.