Internet Rating Group Launches
Voluntary Labeling Campaign
The Internet Content Rating Association has launched the North American Campaign to Protect Children Online. An effort to encourage Web sites to allow ICRA to rate their content, the campaign already has the support of AOL Time Warner, Microsoft Network, and Yahoo!—all of whom have voluntarily added ICRA-defined meta tags to their sites.
“It’s a reincarnation of a system that has been around for years with enormous financial backing, and nobody uses it,” anti-filtering activist Bennett Haselton told the Associated Press October 23. A successor to the video-game ratings scheme of the Recreational Software Advisory Council, the ICRA system assigns meta tags based on content-providers’ responses to an online questionnaire. In turn, parents select from the ICRA-category stop list to block URLs objectionable to that household. The categories include sexuality; hate speech; promotion of drugs, alcohol, or tobacco; violence; gambling; and chat rooms.
ICRA North American Director Mary Lou Kenny touted “good corporate citizenship” as “a much better alternative than government regulation.” However, the plan may become less than voluntary for content providers: A free filter program the ICRA will make available in 2002 will allow parents to block any unrated site.
Posted October 29, 2001.
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