Both the National Children's Home (NCH) and National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) have stated that they'd like to see a total end to chat-room technology!:

John Carr, director of the children and technology unit at the National Children's Home, told ZDNet UK that Microsoft should be congratulated because it has taken a "radical and bold step" in shutting down its chatroom services. He admitted the company's motives for doing so were not clear: "People speculate about Microsoft's motives and maybe they have a range of different motives for doing what they have done, but all I can see is from the child-protection perspective," he said.

According to Carr, reducing the number of chatrooms in the UK will, without doubt, reduce the number of kids using chat services.

"I think some kids will stop using chatrooms altogether -- partly because of the bad publicity they have had and partly because kids are more used to the Internet and realise what a load of rubbish a lot of chatrooms are," he said.

So by example, we'd have to close our forums and live chat services. Perhaps we should all stop using phones as well, you know.. just in case a paedophile happens to use it. No? Better yet, prevent text messages and or communication of any kind.

Once again it's back to our earlier example; if you have 15 million cars on the road and 6 people get killed in separate accidents then do you take all the cars off the road or try to address the problem? We note the following response by Mr Carr following similar criticisms:

Carr disagrees. "If a company realises it cannot run a service that is safe for children, it would be strange logic to keep it running simply because other chat service providers didn't see the world in the same way as you," he said.

It's not safe on building sites for children, but do we stop building or try to address the problem? Perhaps one of the biggest faults in their argument is the clear ignorance of how this would affect everybody else. Oh, but that's not the best quote:

"The old Internet is dying. Children are shifting away from chatrooms to IM systems, because there you are talking to your mates, not a load of weirdos," he said.

So apparently everybody you don't know that you've talked to on the Internet is a 'weirdo', how kind. Finally, has anybody actually bothered to ask children what they think? More @ ZDNet.