The police had been tipped off by suspicious parents, but even so they weren't entirely prepared for what awaited them in a hotel room in the quiet spa town of Leamington, 160 km northwest of London. As they raided one day in August, stepping over the rubber stockings, condoms and sex-aid brochures found scattered about the room's floor, the cops found a 14-year-old girl who'd been enticed there for illegal sex by a man eight years her senior. The pair had corresponded frequently in the poorly policed realm of the Microsoft Network's Internet chat rooms. As David Hipperson pleaded guilty to gross indecency in court last week, software giant Microsoft was simultaneously announcing that it would close MSN chat rooms in most parts of the world, beginning Oct. 14. "We're pleased the prosecution has been successful," says Geoff Sutton, general manager of MSN Europe. "It's the perfect example of why we reached the decision we did."

There's overwhelming evidence that unmonitored chat rooms serve as havens for sexual predators. In the U.K. alone, where over 1 million users access MSN's chat rooms each month, the children's charity NCH has flagged at least 26 cases of child abduction or rape by pedophiles who found their victims in a range of chat rooms. As of next month, MSN aims to crush abuse of this real-time message exchange by closing it down in large parts of Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, halting the spread of pornographic spam and the online "grooming" of youngsters by pedophiles. "Free, unmoderated chat is unsafe," says Sutton. "We took the view that closing it down was the best way to deal with it."

Child-protection groups applauded the move. "If you conclude — as Microsoft has done — that you've provided a new route for pedophiles, then morally you should shut it down," says John Carr, Internet adviser at NCH. "The pedophiles will go to other chat rooms, but it'll be up to those providers to act." Others are less convinced of MSN's tactics and motives. Analysts pointed out that the shuttered chat rooms were money losers, while the company's U.S. rooms, which remain open, could potentially make money.

And the imminent shutdown could have unintended consequences. Some activists worry that during the three weeks before the plug is pulled, children will be especially vulnerable to pedophiles who, masquerading as online friends, may beg them for e-mail addresses or phone numbers.

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Are there ways to protect children online short of shutting down chat rooms? Many Internet companies have decided that a reasonably effective method of weeding out sexual predators is to require chat room habitués to register — and pay. Users must cough up a subscription fee, along with a credit-card number and personal information that can then be used to trace the perpetrator of any future abuse. Indeed, Microsoft itself will in some nations — including the U.S., Japan and Canada — require such subscriptions of between $2 and $10 per month to gain access to MSN chat rooms. So why not extend the same secure service elsewhere? "There is a fundamental difference in scale between America and the U.K., France and others," says Sutton. "In the smaller markets, we considered the trade-off between safety and access, and decided to close the service."

That sounds more like a business decision than an ethical one — a point some Microsoft rivals are quick to make. "MSN had something of a p.r. coup," says Nadia Schofield of Freeserve, the U.K.'s leading Internet service provider, labeling the move "a commercial issue cloaked in moral issues." Other competitors, including AOL — which is part of the company that owns Time — welcomed the move toward better chat moderation. But neither it, nor Germany's T-Online, Europe's largest Internet service provider, said they would be taking down their chat rooms in the regions in which MSN was reluctant to operate. Since their rooms are subscription-based, they argue, they are safer.

Microsoft doesn't disclose whether or not its free chat rooms bring in enough users to make money from advertising, but overall MSN lost some $48 million in the last quarter, so it's no secret that the firm is cutting costs. "Microsoft is moving steadily from ad-supported services to subscriber-supported services," says Rob Helm, director of research at Washington-based independent analysts Directions on Microsoft. "It saves a lot of money when it can get rid of entire infrastructures, so the savings made by getting rid of the whole thing may outweigh the marginal gain. It's a business move with social benefits."

It remains to be seen whether MSN's shutdown will have much effect on the David Hippersons of this world. But regardless of Microsoft's ultimate motivation, parents' fears and corporate bottom lines seem on the way to making free, unmonitored chat rooms a ghost of the Internet past.

• ADAM SMITH
• Why Microsoft really closed its chat rooms