MSN is to ditch its chatroom service next month in 28 countries as part of an effort to protect children online.

The company says it is making the move because online chat services are "increasingly being misused" by spammers and paedophiles. It is closing chatrooms throughout EMEA, much of Latin America and Asia. MSN is retaining unsupervised chatroom services in the US, Canada and Japan, but for subscribers only. In these countries, MSN sells Internet access, so it has names and account details, enabling it to patrol the chatrooms more effectively.

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Do any of you even use the MSN chatrooms? I did for a while, but they sucked.. I don't even chat any more.. but I thought it might be interesting to see how many people are really effected by this MS decision to trim the free services even more..

They already have moderators in every room kicking people out for naughty language.. racism etc... I just see this as a way for Microsoft to reduce services that are free..

And how does a spammer use a chatroom to spam? They can be booted off the network fairly quickly... another misguided attempt to hide their cheapness.