MSN is shutting down its chat rooms beginning in the UK:

The software giant Microsoft declared war on internet paedophiles last night by announcing the closure of its thousands of UK-based chatrooms used by millions of people.
It will also restrict access to chatroom systems around the world, allowing only identifiable, adults living in the same country to use them.

It is their business and they can do what they want with it as it is not quite the same thing as a government shutting down a newspaper. Nevertheless this appears to be a case of thowing out the baby with the bathwater.
Yes, some folks used chatrooms to do bad things. They should be punished just like the folks that do bad things with knives, guns, cars, baseball bats, fists, etc. Lots of people are stabbed yet I still get to have a Swiss Army knife. Pedophiles attempt to lure youngsters into their automobiles, sometime successfully. So should everyone be kicked out of their automobiles? I don’t think so.
One of the supporters of this action says:

“Here we have the world’s leading internet service acknowledging open, free, unmoderated chat cannot be made completely safe for consumers and children

Wow, that is a very high bar indeed. “Completely safe!” Let’s just all curl up and die.
As Katherine says in the first comment at Samizdata, just what is the deal with the ‘living in the same country to use them’ thing? To me, if I were an MSN user, his would be a perfectly good reason to ditch the service. One of the great things about the internet is connecting with people around the world. I wonder with Katherine just which governement(s) is up to what here.
Via Samizdata.