Thursday 25 September 2003

The myth of Satan's web

The illuminati obviously realise that they've got an escaped Geni in the Internet and they are now trying desperately to put it back in it's bottle. I bet they would love it if the only thing you could find on the Net was corporate and government propaganda!

The internet isn't evil - and Microsoft's move to close chatrooms is more about profit than paedophilia

Microsoft's decision to close its online chatrooms yesterday for apparently providing a safe, social haven for paedophiles and their naive prey was universally praised by children's charities and campaigners. On the face of it, it was an act of supreme social responsibility - a company recognising that it could not control its forum for adolescent interaction in a safe way and therefore shutting it down.

But when businesses play the paedophile card, whether it is Microsoft or the News of the World, it always leaves a scintilla of suspicion lurking in the minds of those more cynical than Carol Vorderman. My suspicions were doubly aroused when Gillian Kent, of MSN UK, managed to slip in two mentions of Microsoft's alternative talk medium, its Messenger service, during an interview on the Today programme.

Microsoft's decision to close its unprofitable and potentially litigious chat rooms may have the halo effect of disappointing a number of paedophiles for whom the forum is a low-effort alternative to visiting the local swimming baths or joining the Scouts or becoming ordained into the Catholic church. But to pretend that it was a primary motivation for the move is disingenuous and, what's more, reinforces the disappointingly widely held belief that the internet is a tool of Satan.

Microsoft, like all those of us with free talk areas on their websites, is hosting an expensive online party from which it could never hope to turn a profit. When Microsoft launched its first internet browser, Explorer, I visited its Redmond "campus" where a rueful head of internet admitted: "I am running the division that Bill Gates said we would never have."

The open nature of the web, its unpredictable and uncontrollable proliferation of ideas and open source software was anathema to the world's leading operating systems company. But like all previous obstacles, Microsoft embraced the challenge and crushed the Netscape opposition to produce a democratic way of accessing the web which only the technocracy abhorred.

It is not therefore entirely surprising that a company which found the web a terrific threat should ham up some of the more startling dangers of the medium. It is true that if you let your children have unlimited and unmonitored access to the web they might encounter all the same unthinkably dreadful things they would if let loose in a strange city. But the parental strategy for dealing with this has to be to apply the same kind of vigilance and apocalyptic warnings which accompanied "stranger danger".

One could easily conclude from Microsoft's admission that their chatrooms are full of appalling pornographic spammers and that David Hope, the Archbishop of York, was right when, in 2000, he described the internet as "evil" and said it would "create a society without a soul".

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