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Tossing out all the "be a parent" bullshit posted here since parents have to do stuff like go earn a living sometimes, the correct answer is also in some other posts. Doing this correctly requires a lot more manual intervention then "normal" Google does. You can't automate this without mistakes happening (and that's even if you discount pranksters trying to sneak adult stuff into it deliberately), and the cost of a mistake is a lot higher then it is with the safe search option.

That means they need a staff manually rating stuff. It means checking back on stuff already rated periodically. It means a lot more $$$ then normally spent on a subset of search results. I highly doubt that Google can make that back off special advertising in that section, and I also doubt many people are willing to pay for it.

Something like this would work better if websites were rated and you could set controls in the browser. That was tried once but wasn't widely supported and ICRA (the rating system bundled with IE) appears to have shut down: http://www.icra.org/

Internet Content Rating Association

ICRA ratings have been around for 10 years, and IE even supports it. But nobody uses it, and I've never even met a web developer who has heard of it.

An open standard voluntary system would be fine, where webmasters can add some accepted code into the meta tags of their site so search engines can be trained to recognise and filter it.

Try ICRA: http://www.icra.org/systemspecification/

There already has existed such a feature in Internet Explorer since at least 4.0 which uses W3C's PICS Labels. There has been the Internet Content Rating Association that has been around for a long time promoting that webmasters use PICS Labels to rate their own site and it is completely up to them on how to rate their own sites, of which has its pros and cons (such as webmasters intentionally misrating their site to be assholes).

I just checked firefox 3.0.5 and it doesn't even support PICS Labels, so anybody knows about the other web browsers? I personally have the web content rating disabled in IE because I don't want it, but I could parents might have a use for it, but it is a bit of a mistrust though if webmasters don't correctly rate their site as mentioned above as an example of a con to this concept. in IE at least if a web content rating is enabled and a website does not have a PICS Label then parents can simply deny their child access to the site or it can give a warning.

There are already numerous meta tag schemes for content rating.

http://www.icra.org/label/
http://www.w3.org/PICS/
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/wcl/

Already have it. It's called a PICS label.

Already done.

Er, the ICRA has been around for ages...

This is so sensible. No wonder Congress didn't think of it. It is worth making a phone call about, anyway. But there are already non-government labels akin to MPAA movie ratings, like http://www.icra.org/ or http://www.safesurf.com/ . I guess the problem is too many choices.

Okay, I'm dropping my screen name for this one.

"The ONLY loss for the porn industry is that then every consenting adult lose any excuse to have browsed on porn domain by accident since with .xxx"

As someone who works in the hosting business for a predominantly adult entertainment customer base, I can tell you first hand that "ONLY" does not apply here. When the bulk of U.S. traffic on our bell curves hits around 3PM every single day, one thing becomes clear: the adult industry counts on sneaky employees surfing porn from their desk at work.

By and large, the adult industry shuns the .xxx domain because it makes it too easy for employers to block the entire TLD on the office LAN. Further, searching Google or some other site with "Safe Search" on prevents the "accidental" discovery of adult content when seraching for seemingly innocuous terms. Having the adult sites all under .xxx means that Google will not turn up adult content sites by accident, and thus the adult sites get less traffic, and thus less sales.

There was an additional comment further up the thread here indicating that there are already sufficient standards for flagging adult content sites and that .xxx is not needed for this purpose; that is a false statement. There is in fact NO "standard" for markup of adult content sites. Adult site owners struggle constantly to remain compliant with U.S.C. 2257 regulations which went into effect in the Summer of 2005. They actively seek out every form of markup available such as ICRA, pics_label header for IE browsers and whatever they can find. But there's nobody in charge (remember nobody owns the internet, right?) and thus there is no "standard" of compliance.

The goals of regulation a two-fold and, in my opinion, just:

1) Shield people from the content who should not be exposed to it (i.e. kids, purists)
2) Ensure that minors are not being exploited sexually (child porn)

The 2257 regulations for the U.S. addresses point two, but as yet no regulation addresses point one. .xxx would fix this and enforcement is simpler than you think: registrars pull registration for non .xxx domains displaying adult content. Will it piss off the adult entertainment sector? Yes. They could lose enough money to such a regulation that would put my employer and possibly my job into a tail spin.

But profits be damned - this is about doing the right thing, not making the adult entertainment companies fat and happy. The tobacco industry was not destroyed by the Surgeon General's warning; sex has been around a lot longer than tobacco, and I am confident that a .xxx warning will similarly not destroy that industry. What it all boils down to is, as a parent of a pre-teen, I don't want my kid looking at the nasties that Google brings up when searching for school materials.

Microsoft could have built in functionality for parents to allow use of TIGRS self-certification, just as it built support for PICS labels generated by ICRA's form into IE.

It's been done before and is not a new idea.

PICS labels have been around since 1996, and were proposed to label for language, violence, and sexual content (among others).

ASACP RTA is another labelling scheme from 1996.

ICRA labels have been doing the same since 1999.

RTA and ICRA are in active use today. PICS fell mostly away (to my knowledge) -- probably because it wasn't just for filtering, but for any kind of content tagging. Being a general solution doesn't get the "save the children" mouth-breathers behind you.

The problem with the rel=nsfw is that it is binary. I can't establish any kind of scale for what I want to see (nudity is okay, sex acts are not), and it only filters in one dimension (I can't say that I am okay with sex, but not with violence, or vice-versa for the U.S.A.).

Talk about totally missing out on the already existing adult content rating standards.

Instead of inventing something redundant here, just have browsers installed at work block access to pages rated as "breast exposure", or whatever. There is already a standard with very fine-grained control of exactly what a web page contains, if it's "visible sexual touching", language, or whatever, and the administration can then decide on exactly what they wish to allow. You can even tell that it's "nudity, but in a medical context" if you intend to loosen up the regulations in special cases.

http://www.icra.org/label/generator/

ICRA is supported by Internet Explorer and while strangely enough Firefox don't seem to have built-in support for these schemes to aid for website classification, there should be extensions like ViQ for Firefox to add this support, although I haven't tested it.

Of course, few sites today use this system well, but that's still being vastly better off than inventing some new inflexible "nsfw" HTML attribute, and modifying the HTML standard. Wow...

I thought the idea behind the XXX domain was this : a website registers under that domain. 'Parental Filters' (there is a bad band name in the wings) block all XXX domains. The children are protected and the porn site owners have now made a reasonable attempt to exclude minors from viewing their site. That sounds like an inexpensive way to buy a reasonable amount of protection without resorting to laws or regulations.

Content providers can already use metadata to label HTML pages. Nothing stops porn webmasters from self-labelling their own webpages, and thus helping them be filtered accurately for the benefit of those people who wish to use web filters.

The schemes are generally compatible with all major filtering software. It's better than the proposed XXX domain, since that is at best a one-bit piece of information. For contrast, look at ICRA's label generator to see the better control that can be provided with the already-existing standards.

Anyway, this stuff has been around since the 1990s, and it's dead easy to use. If porn sites aren't already using it (and very few are), then there's no way they are going to voluntarily get rid of their own domain names in favor of xxx.

There are such methods; ICRA (nee RSACi) is one of them, then there's an older system called SafeSurf. Both are supported (last I checked) by MSIE and censorware packages. Not sure about Firefox or like.

I have only a few beefs with these systems:

• Metadata on HTML sucks. PICS labels are antiquated and complex. ICRA tries something based on RDF but I haven't so far seen an open, completely free-to-use standard based on RDF. We probably need something modeled after Dublin Core / Creative Commons metadata.
• ICRA keeps a database of the rated sites and the ToC says they can demand you to remove the ratings if they're incorrect (not sure how frequently they do that though). Since they don't even give detailed definition of some of the labels, I find this a little bit unreasonable. Fuzzy gut-feeling ratings are possibly adequate, but the big point of voluntary rating would be that no one would police them; since the site owner is tasked with the labeling in the first place, not the authority that designs the labeling system, you have to trust the labeler's honesty!
• ICRA and SS ratings are probably a little bit too complex. Like you suggested, it would probably be simpler to just have "appropriate for children: yes/no" label. Or "age group: children/teens/adults". It can't be that difficult!

Funny you mention that. There is a rating system called RSACi that does just this - and it is as easy as a few checkboxes. Internet Explorer supports filtering based on it, since 6.0 at least.

While not perfect, it would certainly filter better than just having "13 or older" and "less than 13" links to sign up for a forum!

ICRA has posted a response to this issue. http://www.icra.org/press/dojresponse/

Hold on a second. Who said anything about banning content? This article is about labeling content. By providing more metadata, you make it easier to provide the correct content to the correct people. In other words, this system can be used to prevent children from viewing pornagraphic materials, and it can be used to help adults find pornographic materials. It is then up to the parent or individual consumer to do thier own filtering of content. This would just provide them with the means to do it.

There is already an international rating association called ICRA http://www.icra.org/, which provides the necessary tools for voluntary site rating. Their system also provides the capability to label the context of a site, that is artistic, educational, or news etc. This solves the news issue raised in the article and the artistic issue raised in the parent.

In Other Words, they're going to make the ICRA a federal program and absolute requirement in all web design?

Why is it that every few months I hear someone clamor for a standard to do this, when there already is one, and it is already supported by 90% of the PCs on the planet?

Check out the ICRA which has been around since the late 90s. A standard which is already supported by Internet Explorer and most commercial internet filtering software.

No, mainly I'm claiming that the primary purpose of the classification is to provide assertive information about the organisation (what country it's in, what subject matter they deal with, etc.).

I'd say .xxx provides some good information about what subject matter a site deals with. No one said anything about making this mandatory and doing so would almost certainly violate the constitution in the US and be pointless since foreign hosting is not governed by US law. This is information for end users and their agents.

No, I haven't heard that. Cite please.

Hmm, I don't know where I last read that. You can take a look at http://www.icra.org/. They are one of the open filtering sites and list the sites that provide actual labeling of metatags throughout their Websites. Most of the closed source filtering programs mention something , somewhere on their Website, but don't go into details. There is also an EU organization that takes voluntary ratings from sites everywhere and provides the information freely for filtering, but I don't know how large their membership is.

I doubt that. A huge amount of paid porn access (most?) happens in the workplace, where employers and their IT departments are constantly playing cat-and-mouse with porn sites. Shutting off all that revenue would be devastating.

This contradicts my experience with corporate networks, but that is only anecdotal. Can you cite a reference? Anyway, most filtered sites are schools, libraries, cafes, and private homes. Public places bring in very little porn revenue and private homes are obviously trying to avoid said sites. I've read that the cost/benefit analysis of kids viewing a porn site from home can be really really horrible. Angry parents, lawsuits, and bad press that drives away customers who want to be clandestine can be devastating. I do know people in the porn industry and I know they submit themselves to filtering services because they feel it saves them money.

From a previous post of mine:

It's a bad idea.

If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.

In addition, .xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.

So .xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.

What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block .xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just .xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors .xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"

Any proxy usage will bypass a .xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).

And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have .xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for .xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.

The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of .xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a .xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.

[The reason that the Christian right is opposed to this is for *completely* different reasons. Their concern is that introducing a .xxx TLD will legitimize porn. Europeans have a certain right to be irritated that these concerns are dictating how the global Internet is run -- however, I strongly doubt that they have any impact. The standards folks are already strongly opposed to a .xxx for actual technical reasons, and has released an RFC 3675 on why it would be a really bad idea to implement it. This is what ICANN is going to pay attention to.

A more robust solution that does not involve turning DNS into a content label would be ratings, such as what is provided by ICRA (formerly RSAC). Have a site rate itself as being a porn site, or being child-friendly, and get the ratings bureau to sign off on this. Browsers can then be configured only to permit access to this type of site.

This technology exists today. It's just that nobody uses it. Perhaps people don't actually care as much about this issue as they'd like others to think?

Both .xxx and .kids are bad ideas because the Internet is not "teh interweb". DNS domains are not "web sites" and it's dangerous to say you want to standardize on "web site content labels" by way of DNS.

What happens when a company publishes both pornographic and non-pornographic content? Do they now have to split up into two DNS domains?

We already have content labels today: PICS and ratings bureaus like ICRA (which actually uses RDF instead of PICS lately).

If you want a kids-safe browsing experience, get the kids-safe web sites to start labeling their content. IE, at least, can be configured to only display pages that meet certain minimum requirements defined by the type of label you use.

If you merely want a safe-from-porn browsing experience, get the porn sites to label their content and indicate that the content is porn. They're just as likely to do this as they are to voluntarily move to .xxx.

Unless this move is made mandatory, many (most?) porn site operators are not going to move to .xxx because they'll look at it the same way that businesses look at .biz: it's for low-budget operations.

I'm going to quote a previous post of mine regarding why .xxx isn't a great idea:

It's a bad idea.

If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.

In addition, .xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say with page-level precision, contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.

So .xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.

What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block .xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just .xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors .xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"

Any proxy usage will bypass a .xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).

And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have .xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for .xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.

The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of .xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a .xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.

You must be talking about the Internet Content Ratings Association?

I assume that everybody here knows that the dangers(uuuhhh) of the internet can't be avoided just by forcing some sites to a certain domain. (won't someone think of the children). The internet is not a nanny.

Still I can understand why a parent would want to filter the internet.
Really the only solution(not a perfect one) would be a white list, for example icra.org. I don't have a Windows box here but I remember that IE used to support this.

But of course it requires that the sites uses this. If you could get the parents to use this, then the sites would have to be rated here to avoid losing traffic.

I had a few sites with content unsuitable for some, and I used the icra label in the header so people could filter the sites out if they wanted.

This keeps coming up because nobody on the internet botherws with self-governance. Yet it is those same people who complain every time a politician proopses something like this. There is already a standard content-rating system that allows sites to rate themselves. Internet Explorer has supported filtering based on that at least as far back as IE 4.0. It's too bad that Mozilla does not, especially because it is becoming popular amongs the Mom & Pops who are trying to avoid spyware.

Censorship of the internet is inevitable, and it is going to be a pain since every government is going to have a different set of rules. If everybody just stuck the RSAC or ICRA tags on their pages then we would have a strong argument about why this isn't necessary. Or at least, we could make the laws uniformly require that sites use the standard, rather than enforcing their own regulation. It would put the power back in the hands of the parents.

This keeps coming up because nobody on the internet botherws with self-governance. Yet it is those same people who complain every time a politician proopses something like this. There is already a standard content-rating system that allows sites to rate themselves. Internet Explorer has supported filtering based on that at least as far back as IE 4.0. It's too bad that Mozilla does not, especially because it is becoming popular amongs the Mom & Pops who are trying to avoid spyware.

Censorship of the internet is inevitable, and it is going to be a pain since every government is going to have a different set of rules. If everybody just stuck the RSAC or ICRA tags on their pages then we would have a strong argument about why this isn't necessary. Or at least, we could make the laws uniformly require that sites use the standard, rather than enforcing their own regulation. It would put the power back in the hands of the parents.

There is already a standardized way to do this, but nobody is using it.

The ICRA (formerly know as RSAC) defines a meta tag that allows a web site to indicate the level of violence, nudity, etc. that is on a page, or a site, or a directory of a site. It is easy, unbiased, and self-reporting. Internet Explorer supports it. I don't know if any other browsers do. All of the off-the-shelf parental control programs support it. But I don't see any sites adding these labels to their pages. Why not?

Maybe I should email the search engines and ask them to support it in their searches. Google already has a safety setting in the image search.

There is already a standardized way to do this, but nobody is using it.

The ICRA (formerly know as RSAC) defines a meta tag that allows a web site to indicate the level of violence, nudity, etc. that is on a page, or a site, or a directory of a site. It is easy, unbiased, and self-reporting. Internet Explorer supports it. I don't know if any other browsers do. All of the off-the-shelf parental control programs support it. But I don't see any sites adding these labels to their pages. Why not?

Maybe I should email the search engines and ask them to support it in their searches. Google already has a safety setting in the image search.

So you can bypass the filters with a little network know-how, like that is new.

It is unique in two ways: first, this is *very* easy, and second, someone else can do the work for you (e.g. I could simply mirror the .xxx hierarchy in a non-.xxx hierarchy, and the entire thing would be bypassed). It's also hard to reverse engineer and create key generators for CSS -- but once one person has done it, *anyone*, no matter the level of knowledge, benefits. That's where the problem comes in.

I haven't heard of these content describing metatags before reading your post. Slashdot doesn't appear to have them, so please give us a link where this content tag standard is given. Are you saying that every page on the net should have tags inserted or be blocked?

"Metatags" is a generic term for any type of tag containing metainformation -- I was referring to ICRA.

Are you saying that every page on the net should have tags inserted or be blocked?

I'm saying that that is a superior alternative to having the same thing done, but with only domain-level granularity, and on the basis of whether or not it is in .xxx versus whether or not it is tagged.

And no website is being forced to move to .xxx. SaudiBikiniGals.com isn't forced. AnalYanks.com isn't forced. Who cares about complaints about their choise of TLD? If your government of choice happens to force you, then that sucks but they could do much worse.

The argument that nobody (or at least some people) aren't forced to take part in something is certainly not a counterargument to someone saying that it has severe problems.

As for "government of choice", that's quite a simplification. Changing citizenship is hardly an off-the-cuff decision. If the technical problems with the idea that you are promoting have, as a solution, changing your citizenship, something is quite wrong with the solution.

Cashcow or not, .xxx hurts only those who buy them. Maybe we should get rid of .net, .org and every other TLD, they are only cashcows, .com should be enough for everybody!

Actually, I don't much like the fact that Verisign and a couple of other registrars do encourage people purchasing foobar.com to also purchase foobar.net and foobar.org "with one easy click!". However, those other TLDs have quite legitimate uses -- they are hierarchical classifiers for domains. .xxx is not.

HTML's meta tags is one option, but if you can set custom HTTP headers (e.g. via your HTTP server config, or .htaccess files on Apache) then you can tag all of your content like this.

It's still more complex than a simple file, I agree, but it does allow for finer-grained control.

There are ICRA users out there (search for "labelled with icra", "labeled with icra" - the standard logo's alt text is "labelled with icra"/"labeled with icra" depending on whether you're using UK or US English), some of which are porn (search for "labelled with icra" porn, "labeled with icra" porn). Obviously this is going to be nowhere near the full number of users, as it relies on them having the default button/text, though, and yes, it could do with a bit more promotion.

Movies have one. Television shows have one. Song lyrics have one. Games have one.

It's a bad idea.

If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.

In addition, .xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.

So .xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.

What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block .xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just .xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors .xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"

Any proxy usage will bypass a .xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).

And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have .xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for .xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.

The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of .xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a .xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.

Funny, as a webmaster for adult sites, I've never ever heard of PICS. I use ICRA META TAGS on my sites.

http://www.icra.org/

enter your site, answer some questions and you will get the correct code for a meta tag for your site/page

Aha! (Why don't they put things like that in the article?) By the way, I never did manage to find the questionnaire part where it's supposed to generate a label for you, but that's not really what I wanted anyway. The full set of labels and their meanings is what I actually needed.

http://www.icra.org/

enter your site, answer some questions and you will get the correct code for a meta tag for your site/page

Aha! (Why don't they put things like that in the article?) By the way, I never did manage to find the questionnaire part where it's supposed to generate a label for you, but that's not really what I wanted anyway. The full set of labels and their meanings is what I actually needed.

http://www.icra.org/

enter your site, answer some questions and you will get the correct code for a meta tag for your site/page

...requires Internet content providers that create or host data in Utah to properly rate the data...

(7) "Properly rated" means content using a labeling system to label material harmful to minors provided by the content provider in a way that...
(a) accurately apprises a consumer of the presence of material harmful to minors; and
(b) allows the consumer the ability to control access to material harmful to minors based on the material's rating by use of reasonably priced commercially available software, including software in the public domain.

http://www.icra.org/webmasters/

Wouldn't this be a valid solution?

Limiting free speech is a bad idea. As much as I don't like a lot of the content on the internet, taking away people's rights to say what they want could have harmful side effects.

I mean, what's next, you can't talk about religion? You can't talk about politics? You can't talk about someone elses mother?

Those who cry about free-speech issues, are just anal or incapable of the critical thinking necessary to realize that there really is no issue there.

I think you need a mirror. What YOU classify as inappropriate for your children maybe different from what I or others belive. Just because someone says "It's for the children", does not make it so.

Who decides what goes where? Which "moral set" controls it? A group in Kentucky will have different criteria than one based in California.

I belive violence is a worse threat to kids than sex is, what about a .violent domain?

Or you can setup your browser so that ICRA ratings are required and don't let your kids view unrated sites. My daughter I let surf unencumbered, but I track her logs via proxy (which she can't defeat); My son on the other hand is restricted via ratings and a list to where he can go.

BWP

Wouldn't it be great if there was some sort of standard way for site owners to label their content that was supported by browsers?
[/sarcasm]

We don't need a new TLD for this...the solution is already in place, it's just that people don't use it.

One problem is the vast number of sites which, for various reasons, don't label appropriately - usually either because they don't label at all or intentionally try to keep ahead of the censorware.

Another problem is that any set of rules will result in miscategorization, while whitelist/blacklists are neither scalable nor do they satisfy the desire for local control of categories.

I'm the concerned parent of a 5 year-old (who uses "google" as a verb), a trained teen sexuality educator, and I'm extremely anti-censorship. As you may guess, I'm occasionally conflicted on this topic. Basically, I've come to the conclusion that for my family, what I'm looking for is a tool that lets me filter out the bulk of the egregious crap (porn, hate, violence, ads) for casual use.

I'd even be satisfied with a warning rather than a hard filter in non-blacklisted cases: "Warning: the requested page will probably make your little head explode - follow this link if you really want to got there or click here if you want someone else to check it out for you".

--

You're looking for the Internet Content Rating Association, perhaps?

No offense, but I don't think you really understand the "adult" industry on the web.

Not all of us want to spam you with our website.
Not all of us want to trick you into visiting, or deluge you with popups should you ever commit the horror of trying to leave the site.
Not all of us have a blatant disregard for wanting to keep kids out of our sites.

Personally, I'd love to transfer EVERY domain we have over to a ".xxx" or ".adult" or ".sex" or whatever TLD. Existing *.com domains we'd setup to redirect to the *.xxx version.

Yes, something like this would be voulentary, and yes there would be people out there who wouldn't do it. However, I'd love there to be a way that we could easily segregate our adult sites away from the rest of the internet, so that those who DO want to block such things can do with a reasonable accuracy.

It really could go either way. With a *.xxx policy, you'd have very few false positives (who would register and use their .xxx domain, knowing that many people would block it?), but a decent number of false negatives until it caught on.

With a *.kids policy, you knot only have to have someone very STRICTLY controlling its use (or it becomes useless), you'd be forced to limit browsers use to just *.kids if you wanted to play it safe. That's not going to leave much of the internet left until it had a real critical mass going.

You'd also have to deal with the sticky subject of what exactly IS .kids material? What's okay for 15 year olds isn't okay for 7 year olds. Whose idea of what's acceptable do you use?

99.99% of the adult webmasters out there would LOVE a way to keep kids out of the sites. We would love a simple check box that every ultra-conservative letter-writing crusader could check that would make sure they never saw our sites. Yes, we use ICRA style tags that are meant as content advisories to browsers, but every attempt at making THOSE known to users have failed.

I can understand some of the reasons people have for not wanting an "adult only" tld, but I think its use would have a much greater public good than... oh, say... .aero?

If they must legislate something, why not require every site with potentially evil material to use one of the content rating systems, like the ICRA, which at least MSIE and Netscape support.

It would appear that a .pdf of the enacted text of the Children's Internet Protection Act can be found here (check in the middle of the page, under "McCain Amendment No. 3610").

My question is this: would the icra voluntary content rating system qualify as a "technology" under the bill sufficient to comply with the statute and the regulation? If so, the thing to do is to head to your local library and get them to implement ICRA, a self-rating and filtering tool based on voluntary disclosure by the page author of web site content. A quick and dirty summary of ICRA can be found here. I'm interested to know what /.ers think about this possible compromise.

--J

fixed URL