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RSS feedsWeb portal AltaVista has been forced to drop all of its community services because they are not safe enough for children to access. The move follows Yahoo UK's recent decision to bar access to US chat rooms containing adult content.
Following the recent arrests of members of a web paedophile group, internet authorities are clamping down hard on services that fail to offer enough protection for children surfing the web.
AltaVista was forced to abandon all its chat rooms, bulletin boards and free email after the Better Business Bureau (BBB) found that the company did not take enough precautions to prevent minors from accessing adult only areas.
A statement from the company said: "AltaVista has closed down all of its community services" in order to remain "committed to [preventing] children under the age of 13 from accessing adult content on the AltaVista website".
The Children's Advertising Review Unit of the BBB said that the problem was with AltaVista's registration process. It does not provide enough screening facilities to prevent children from entering more adult orientated areas of the site and makes it easy for children to lie about their ages.
The Unit also pointed out that AltaVista users did not even have to be registered members before they could access pornographic content in the site's club section.
If a company continues to violate the legislation set down by the Unit or the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, the authority can instigate an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.
David Kerr, chief executive of the Internet Watch Foundation, said that the announcement was evidence that self-regulation was becoming increasingly appealing. "We learnt the lesson fairly early on that there needs to be more regulation of content on the internet."
But he added: "Although self-regulation is positive, we need to strike a balance so that the authorities and governments acting as regulators do not gain too much power."
