Internet Firms Launch New Web Rating System

Jeremi writes: "Salon has a brief article about a new content self-rating system being proposed to Congress in lieu of government-imposed restrictions. I wonder if this is a good thing or bad, and whether or not it will succeed where previous attempts failed?"

Comments

hehe

[KillerBob]

It's going to work for about 5 minutes. Then little Billy is going to figure out that he can kill the software that blocks the website using any myriad of ways. (CTRL-ALT-DEL/taskmanager comes to mind, but also holding SHIFT at boot, going into MSCONFIG to remove the actual entry at startup, etc.)

The other thing is: it's a voluntary rating system. What's to say babylonX or whatever else you're visiting just says screw-it and posts the porn without rating it? You can't block every website that doesn't have a rating, since that'd block waay too much of the web out.

And even if they can get around those hurdles, there'll be web-based proxy services set up to strip the pages of their ratings, or mask the ratings.

Nope. Not gonna happen. Never work. Nice thought, though.

Great idea

[UserChrisCanter4]

(Please excuse US centered nature of post. I have no experience with foreign ratings systems)

Self-imposed rating systems have generally worked fairly well, with the bonus that they keep Congress off of the entertanment industry's backs.

Think about the Motion Picture Ratings Board. They're completely self-created. They rate the movies according to their standards. The movie theaters voluntarily choose whether they want to carry an NC-17 or Unrated film, and all goes well. As far as I know, the under 17 w/o parent at an 'R'-rated movie isn't a law, it's just something the theaters choose to follow.

Ditto for the ESRB (the guys that handle videogames). Completely voluntary, but it helps parents make a decision. I'd rather have 'M' slapped on the front of some Zombie game than Congress telling me there will be no zombie game.

I could see this working very well for Website rating. A simple HTML extension ([rating="13"]) could be picked up by the browser, and displayed/not displayed accordingly. Simple enough. And the pr0n sites can go on to advertise "Super XXX pr0n... there isn't a rating on the books bad enough for this stuff!!"

Re:Great idea

[2Flower]

Unfortunately, the movie rating system doesn't work well. Theatres rarely carry NC-17 or unrated films, under the assumption that they're pornography, which would get them in hot water.

As a result, dramas and other films which have nothing to do with pornography (ie, materials designed to stimulate) will never get proper exposure unless they are trimmed down to R rated levels. You could have the best movie ever made, oscar material up the wazoo, but definitely intended for a mature audience who can approach the concepts it explores in an adult fashion... but it better be R, or it's bad bad pr0n.

Websites will likely work the same way; if your site is rated too high, regardless of the INTENT of the site (sexual education materials, evidence of war atrocities in other counteries, etc) it'll be blacklisted.

Re:Great idea

[Black Art]

Volentary at the point of a gun.

Most, if not all, of the rating systems mentioned have been imposed out of fear that "if we do not do it, congress will do something worse". (What part of "Congress shall make no law" do they not understand? All of it, judging by their actions.) The implied threat of congresional action has been the driving force for every one of these censorship systems.
The MPAA's ratings were due to congresional hearings. So was the Comics Code. So was the record labels. So was the V-Chip.

Each was an attempt to supress material that some congresscritter did not like. (In violation of the constitution of the US and their oath of office.)

Taking complex material and rendering it into narror catergories of acceptability is what gave us Network television. Hopefully the web will not turn into something that bland and sanitized. Ratings will only accelerate that process.

It'll kill small sites through litigation

[ghostlibrary]

Oh, this is pretty clear, but not necessarily good.

Optional ratings. But the free filters will likely default to automatically blocking unrated sites. After all, the goal is clearly stated that they want to convince parents to install the software, ergo, they need the ratings to have value in order to convince them, ergo unrated sites have to be put down.

So site owners have to rate. But, aha, rating incorrectly will have to be made a crime, else those illegal pornographers will rate themselves as 'kid-friendly', dontchaknowit.

After all, if there isn't a _law_ forcing honest ratings, who can trust the ratings? They'll fail otherwise.

Then, with this law, hmm... we'll need a way to handle complaints and dispute ratings. Hey, they do a good job with those domain disputes and such, use a closed board like that. Heck, use the same WIFO!

Small sites then get "Your site was reported as illegally abusing the rating scheme with inaccurate ratings. Please reply to each complaint in this 20-page form within 10 days or your domain will be revoked."

Suddenly, small sites are either a) bogged down in paperwork or b) unrated and thus blocked by most browsers.

*sigh* And don't even get me started if they decide they don't need a top ratings board, that ratings can be enforced through 'local standard', i.e. any state can file in their state court to contest your site's ratings. Suddenly, small sites get suits in any state that disagrees with the site owner's interpretation of the ratings.

Then there's the world level...

NIH?

[vsync64]

This sounds exactly like PICS. In fact, I can't find a single mention of how it's different, except that this is promoted by "industry leaders" (such as Yahoo!, AOL-TW, and MSN, oh joy) instead of actually technically competent engineers like the ones who invented PICS. Oh, and that it requires a "free filtering program that will be available next spring" (vaporware). Which of course will almost certainly leave Mac and *nix users out in the cold. Wanna bet that they leech some personal spam fodder in exchange for the "free" program?

The only mention that could possibly be of PICS is the following:

A previous set of filtering standards was less specific, but shipped with Internet browsers.

Which is so vague as to be useless. And the exclusion of any mention of the existing voluntary granular filtering system makes me wonder why they're scared of comparing themselves to it. Also I'd like to find out how this new "standard" is more specific.

Yet Another Censorship Plan...

[Black Art]

This is yet more of the same. They seem to believe that if there are little labels on everything, then those things that they do not like can be blocked.

Previous attempts at this have failed. This one will too. They will try again with yet another plan. Loop until universe ends.

TV ratings and the V-Chip were a way to "save our children", Now the groups that pushed for them are upset that noone but them are using them to block what kids see.

What these people really want is for all content *they* find objectionable to be driven off the net. (Be it porn, descriptions of anti-social behaviour, criticism of their religious beliefs, people who are not good liberals/conservitives/communists/Americans(tm)/wh atever, and anything else that twigs them at a given moment.)

They use children as an excuse. It is not the children they wish to protect, but their own fragile sensibilities.

What they do not believe in is the right to freedom of speech, freedom of thought or freedom of action for anyone other than themselves.

Childhood is supposed to be a time to train children to be adults. What happens to these kids when they get out into the unfiltered world on their own? The answers seem to be overindulgence in the things that they were forbidden to do by their parents. This leads to a bunch of self-destructive adults.

Seems to me that filters are a panecia for parents who are afraid or unable to teach their children about the real world.

Re:"Lack of censorship" is a public good

[MxTxL]

The problem is that pr0n operators will ALL want these ratings. Don't believe me? There are two compelling reasons. First, the raunchier and nastier and worse rated the site is, the more traffic it will get, that's a fact. Second, and more importantly, the pr0n sites actually do want kids off of their sites. Why? Because kids don't have credit cards. If they don't have credit cards, they aren't paying to see their pr0n, they are just eating up bandwidth. Nobody wants their bandwidth eaten up. There would be no financial reason to mislabel their sites as kid friendly.

Now, the real problem with this is that it does open the door for government regulation. If site owners accept a voluntary rating system, and everything goes well, pretty soon there will be a mandated system, and not too long after that, the sites that are somewhat controversial, but speak about important issues are then censored.

RSAC

[istartedi]

The article says it's just a re-hashed version of something that's been around for a while, and by that I assume they are referring to RSAC.

I don't see anything wrong with this. It's NOT censorship. TV programs have to label their content. Sure it's cryptic (quick, what's TV MPVD got in it?), but it doesn't stop people who don't care from watching the program. If something like RSAC became the standard for rating, it wouldn't stop people from viewing porn either. It would be the internet equivalent of labeling.

We already expect labeling for TV programs and food, why not on-line content? The only real problem I have with it is that it's a hassle for small web-sites, which is why I expect these systems haven't caught on too well. I mean, as a general rule I don't have "trash" on my site, but if I feel the need to post frontal nudity to make a point about something, or say "fuck" somwhere, I don't want to have to worry about losing my content rating.

So for me, the choice is "be on gaurd all the time" or "not care about content rating". So far, the former has been the more appealing choice and I expect it's like that for most people.

What they need is a category for sites where the content is "not for children" but on the other hand is "not catering strictly to the prurient interest". In other words, simple categories like G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, X, XX, XXX and XP (the P stands for Puke). RSAC is just too complicated; it tries to do "fine grained" content filtering.

Of course another big problem with all this is that there is simply too much content on the net. It's one thing for volunteers to rate movies and TV; there are only so many hours of it per year. Rating the net would just take way too long. So, we are left either with people rating their own stuff, or companies trying to rate it. Everybody has their own opinion about where the cut-off for a particular rating is, so there is no way to trust the rating. Even if there were, you can't put any legal teeth to it because content providers would have to open themselves up for a law suit. So, the content provider is still going to choose "not rated" as their rating.

The bottom line? Teach your children well; and let them live in fear of the librarian seeing something over their shoulder, just like we lived in fear of the teacher finding our stash.

Re:RSAC

[istartedi]

Slashdot is the perfect example of why ratings systems don't work. You can't really rate Slashdot. You'd have to rate individual posts. After all, each post is under the editorial control of the poster, not Slashdot. In a sense, Slashdot is a tiny little internet, and it already has its own form of filtering--moderation.

Of course unlike with a filter, Slashdot does not provide any way for the "parent" to keep the "child" from reading posts that have been moderated down. Many would argue that filters don't either. :)

However, if you backed me into a corner and forced me to rate Slashdot, I'd give it a PG. That's because it's not a "kiddy" site. It sometimes displays or links to material that ought to be in a more restricted category, but such material is almost always moderated down. In fact, Slashdot may actually teach a valuable lesson in that regard. The young reader probably develops some sense of what the community at large considers acceptable. Of course you can *link* to anything and presumeably rating on the other site would take care of it.

I guess, now that I think about it, the analogy to use is walking through the neighborhood. You don't keep your kid from going to the store because he might hear a stranger use dirty words. So, if the express purpose of the mailing list, newsgroup, or weblog is PG in nature, then it should be rated PG even though people sometimes abuse it.

And yes, that doesn't keep kids from using the group to exchange porn, just as they couldn't keep us from accessing some parent's stash "back in the day". So, to reiterate... ratings are just not very practical, which is why I don't like them... but they help us to maintain a certain fiction... which in strict logical terms is useless, but it probably serves a social function. After all, wasn't part of the thrill knowing you were doing something bad?

It's gotta work...

[c_jonescc]

At least as well as self-policing has historically in the oil/timber/mining industries!

Re:Porn sites? No way!

[MxTxL]

Actually, pr0n sites want as many paying customers as humanly possible, since this is the only way to earn money. Even with banner ads and through refferrals and all that, someone somewhere has to have a credit card and pay to get his pr0n. Kids have no credit cards and thus are not the people that the pr0n sites are after. If they are not paying, all they are doing is eating up bandwidth which, for pr0n sites, is really expensive since they pay a premium for pr0n bandwidth.

Besides, the worse rating they have, the better they can say their content is. Look we have a XXX rating, the nastiest stuff on the net!

Some good, some bad, but overall seems good.

[Jimithing DMB]

Well, I really don't know what to say here. For one thing, they mention it at the bottom of the article that this has been tried before but is not widely used. The reason it has not been widely used is because most people don't know about it. For example, people call in to MSN tech support wondering how to block sites and they are told to use Content Advisor which can be found in internet options under the tools menu or in the control panel. However AOL has put its content-blocking up-front in its interface because they felt it was an important option for their customers.

Now, if you think about this sytem, yes, people could lie about the content ratings. People could also rate themselves incorrectly because they don't think they are being objectionable. It's a very subjective thing. So I think for the most part this part of the system will fail because e.g. the author of a website advocating gay-rights may not find their content to be objectionable. And in reality, it really isn't unless they are describing a specific sexual act which I think the person rating the page would realize and rate it appropriately (one would hope). Note that the same would be true for a website describing any sexual act (homo/hetero/whatever you please).

The problem is that some parents want their kids to live in ignorance and like to cry that it should be legislated-- especially after watching the latest NBC/ABC/CNN/etc. report about the dangers of the internet.

So what intrigued me most was that the software would allow you to specify to receive blacklists from organizations that you trust. This is actually a really damn cool idea and I am surprised no-one thought of it before. That is, rather than by some prepackaged software with a prepackaged blacklist that may or may not follow what you want to allow your kids to see you can setup your software to point to several organizations that independently come up with blacklists.

On the software side of things it should be possible (and I would say desirable) to write free software which can utilize these lists (and I am speaking in the GNU sense of free software). This way you are absolutely certain that your program is not doing things it shouldn't be.

On the business side of things you can make money very easily simply by charging a very modest subscribtion fee for your blacklists. You can even create your blacklists by using other orgs blacklists. For example you could collect several blacklists from either non-profit or profit organizations (which presumably you may need to pay a license fee for) and then sell the easy collection of them as one master blacklist. You could even then allow parents to select which ones they would like to have combined into their personal blacklist.

Notice that this actually sounds like a real business model... i.e. charge people a recurring fee for a recurring service. Assuming the cost of creating the blacklists or licensing them from other orgs (i.e. your costs) are less than the total revenues you make from your subscribtions then using the basic profit=revenue-cost you make a profit. Go figure, an internet company making a profit.

This also has benefits as it creates a lot of competition. I.e. if your customers find out your blacklists are crappy and are blocking things they didn't ask for they will just go to one of your competitors. Creates incentive to actually run your business properly. This competition in turn is good for the economy. Damn, funny how when you think about it if everyone follows the basic rules of capitalism then everyone wins. Obviously this is a simplistic view of things but it does at least make sense (at least in my mind).

Feel free to beat me with a clue-stick (well, don't be that harsh, just post a reply) if you feel I or others would benefit from your opinion. That is to say if all you want to say is "censorship sucks" please go away. I hate censorship as much as the next guy, but the bottom line is that we need to make things as easy as possible for parents to control what their children view so the government doesn't step in and do it for us. And one can hope that the clued-in parents will say the hell with it, do what you want, if you don't know better it's your damn problem (that was my parents attitude). However note that very few parents would like their kids to see the goatse.cx pages and that is really what most parents want to prevent and why people are crying for filtering on the internet. If a self-rating system combined with blacklists from trusted organizations who provide open blacklists can do this without requiring government intervention then I am all for it.

Well...

[UserChrisCanter4]

I can see your point, but as we all know, the web is very different.

I, for one, have seen plenty of Unrated films at theaters. It's just not at AMC-type super mega-plexes (think Yahoo, Go.com, etc.). It's always been at the local "arthouse" cinema (think the small-time website that earns maybe 1,000 to 5,000 hits in a month). Sure, those small-time film makers rarely earn Lucas or Michael Bay make, but their stuff DOES get shown.

And really, haven't all the major websites pretty much dumped "adult" material altogether (with the exception of maybe pulling them up in a search)?

The Net != Corporate Entertainment

[dcollins]

The examples where self-ratings have previously worked are basically the fairly centralized entertainment media of movies, music, comic books and to an extent, TV (suddenly I can't remember seeing those ratings for TV shows in a while).

I can see very large differences which distinguish these projects from something like an internet website, namely, (1) they're all done by a limited set of corporations, (2) they're all done expressly for profit, (3) they're basically all done in some class of retail outlets that can apply pressure on the manufacturers to comply or be ostracized.

Publishing on the web doesn't resemble these kinds of things, I think, even in the majority of cases to date. Anyone can publish a web site nowadays, and desire for as huge a customer base as possible is not a compelling motivation in a lot of cases.

I may be reaching, but I tend to think that the act of publishing on the web is more akin to sending a piece of postal mail, or using a photocopier to make some cheap posters or pamphlets. It's just too widespread, accessible, and low-impact for a lot of the practicioners to be concerned about being compliant with some categorization system for their website. There's no "website industry" as such to reach an agreement and take universal action in this regard, as there has been for the other self-rating programs which have to date succeeded.

Why is porn always the issue?

[NKJensen]

Why is it that porn is considered dangerous while violence, killing and destruction of any kind it considered normal...

Were you created by violence or human sexual behavior?

Re:This is censorship

[JM_the_Great]

Read the article before posting. This is -not- censorship. And why switch to Linux because of it? (now I'm sure I can come up with some other reasons to switch, but this is not one of them) It's not built in to IE or Nutscrape, it's just an add-on parents can get so that when litle Suzie is looking up information on Breast Cancer for a school report she doesn't accidentally get a pr0n site that reproduces windows like cancer.

Basically, this is not manditory - nobody is going to force you to use their filter (except perhaps your Mom) and it doesn't make anybody take any content off the Internet. As for the blocking all content that hasn't been rated - it's the only way to

a) make people rate their sites (assuming they want the largest audience possible)
b) protect themselves against unknown sites, after all, if it's not rated, who knows if it's Betty's Cooking Secrets or Live-XXX!!!

Anyway, IMNSHO, this is a good idea.