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Stephen Toulouse, also known as Stepto, is the Director of Xbox LIVE Policy and Enforcement at Microsoft. http://www.stepto.com/

But they weren't strategic decisions, they were just mistakes resulting from the chronic miscalculation of what the real world can actually do outside of their test environments. It's not a strategy, they're just really bad at knowing how people actually use many of their products... including most specifically, what kind of hardware and network real estate people have access to. Dating back to the first SMB/NMB system (and before? I didn't have much experience prior) they just assumed that you had tons of spare network to let your file/print servers/clients constantly blather to each other about where they were and how they were feeling. As long as what the user was looking at worked mostly like they said it would and the basic 'just make it work' configuration could be done by some greenhorn who'd gone to a week long MS boot camp class, they simply didn't care what their products were doing to the back of the house to make it happen because in their environments it simply didn't matter. The fact that the hardware price/performance progress has been so steady is probably one of the only reasons that every MS OS release prior to windows 7 hasn't been a carbon copy of the Vista release. They actually assumed that everybody was not only going to go out and buy new hardware to run Vista, but they were going to buy *nice* hardware to run Vista... which is obviously something that most consumers simply weren't willing to do. I think they just *assumed* that everyone would have an awesome actually unlimited data plan to make their cloudy dreams happen. Now that the wireless comm industry is giving some whole-hearted push back with smaller caps (like in the UK) I'm willing to bet that this is going to cause some friction.

Someone earlier posted a link to this blog entry which is a pretty good read:

http://www.stepto.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=486

That probably is right.

The guys tone seems to be that he knows best and that his view is commonly held, and that the people arguing are only doing so for the sole purpose of arguing.

He's in charge of policing xbox live. Have you been on xbox live? Cops get jaded from seeing too many meth-heads, drunks, assholes, and wannabe gangsters. It should not be surprising if he gets a bit jaded. I mean, this is the internet. Imagine having to police a million teenagers. I saw him talk at PAX, and he actually was a lot less jaded than I would have anticipated, I was impressed. Here's a transcript of his talk, and includes some of what they clean up on live.

During the Q and A session, one or two people in the audience decided to try to argue that their being banned was unjustified. Needless to say, they said they had done nothing wrong and deserved to be reinstated. Also needless to say, there was no way for the guy at the podium to verify any of that, and yet these people would not shut up or let him continue. Those are the types of people he has to deal with all day, except they're not face to face, so they're more brazen than that. It's easy to see why he might assume they were arguing just to argue: it's undoubtedly happened to him many, many times before. For example, last year, some stupid kid got banned for numerous offenses while playing modern warfare. He put a video, heavily edited to make it look like he did nothing wrong, up online, and started trying to get people on his side. source

Anyway, Mr. Toulouse undoubtedly has little power to decide what MS will allow to be posted on their service, or their policy on users posting swastikas. It doesn't do anyone any good for him to say "Let's talk about this" when he's been told by his boss that he needs to keep swastikas off so that MS doesn't get bad PR from it.

Stephen Toulouse works on the live team and posted his thoughts on the matter.

There was a previous instance of something similar happening. Stephen Toulouse, who heads up the team that handles enforcement, wrote up a blog entry about the policy choice.

From what I read there it seems pretty reasonable. Not that I support censorship in general but they state that TheHeterosexualGamer would be banned for similar reasons. I don't really see how this as a discrimination issue.

There was a previous instance of something similar happening. Stephen Toulouse, who heads up the team that handles enforcement, wrote up a blog entry about the policy choice.

Of course, for more up-to-date information peek at his Twitter feed for today.

Here's an informative link on KPP or PatchGuard.

...so that you could remove the speck from your brother's.