BBC News, Tuesday, 23 September, 2003

Microsoft's internet service MSN has taken a major step in net safety
which could sound the death knell for unsupervised chatrooms.

Public good is such a nice term. Very vague and almost anything justified by public good becomes unarguable. Well, I would like he MSN to answer these questions before they pull the plug on their chatrooms.

• How hard do you think it would be to find a free and unregulated chat room?
• How about IRC chatrooms? How hard will it be before children learn about IRC chatrooms?
• Do you not think that meeting people from differen cultures or social backgrounds provide children with a different perspective ?

It would be better to have a course in online privacy and security rather than having a knee jerk reaction of stopping the chat rooms. Granted that many people haunt the chat rooms with malicious intents, but it a good resource to keep in touch with friends or to meet new people. Lets not just pay a lip service to the wonders of Internet and try to back stab it in the same breath.

• The Slashdot discussion
• BBC's Talking Point
• BBC's article on this topic. There are also some good links on the sidebar here