Police chief slams Yahoo! chatroom silence
Free Speech
11/17/2000; 12:56:34 PM

'It has been a difficult week for Yahoo!. Three children's charities including Childnet International, NCH Action for Children and Childwatch lambasted the company for its policy on Internet chat. Later, expert child psychologists warned that Internet chatrooms are likely to increase the number of attacks on children in the UK and urged Yahoo! to act before more children fall prey to the kind of attacks Patrick Green put his victim through.'

WriteTheWeb has good commentary:

'The real-time aspect is a crucial one here. According to ZDNet's article, Yahoo will only consider removing content that is found to be illegal. Chat environments are real-time. There is no way of "removing content" after the event - what's said is said.

'Policing chat rooms means exactly that - paying someone to monitor each and every one of them. And Yahoo, no matter how well it is performing compared to some of its corporate peers, cannot afford to do that just yet. Even if it wanted to.'

How do you explain that the only reason you can't do something is that it's impossible, when nobody believes it's impossible?

"Can't you just write some sort of program or something?"