This site has been
PICS-labeled
since 1996
One obstacle to the general adoption and use of the Internet has been the tension between the ideal of free speech on the one hand, and parents' legitimate concerns about protecting their children from pernicious speech on the other. Reactions to this conflict have gone through several phases, but credible tools are available for parents and have been for some time.
Initial development of the Internet primarily involved academics and college students, for whom free speech and broad opposition to censorship were natural and non-threatening. There also were, and still are, free speech purists who feel that there should be no controls or censorship of the Net at all, or at least that all filtering in a public context such as libraries violates First Amendment rights. This attitude is comfortable for college people, but obviously doesn't address parents' concerns.
Thinking about more active measures took two philosophical approaches, the more draconian approach of trying to somehow force removal of objectionable content from the Internet entirely, most likely by the threat of criminal penalties, and another camp seeking means for parents to control for themselves which things out of the broad panorama of the Net their children should be able to see.
The drastic measures philosophy, of course, produced the so-called Communications Decency Act (1996) sponsored by the former Senator Exon of Nebraska. This took the approach of attempting to criminalize the transmission of poorly-defined "indecent" materials over computer networks. Aside from being vaguely worded, the CDA also had the fundamental problem of trying to regulate a global network by means of a national law. The expression "ham-handed" is one that was often used to describe the CDA.
The language of the CDA provided for quick federal review, in the case of its constitutionality being challenged, which was quickly done, by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others. In June 1996 a three-judge federal panel in Philadelphia unanimously ruled the CDA to be "unconstitutional on its face." The Supreme Court upheld this ruling 9-0 in June 1997.
The Child Online Protection Act (1998) was essentially a rehash of the CDA. COPA only limited commercial speech and only affected providers based within the United States. COPA has been enjoined and struck down several times in various federal courts, but as of mid-2007 the government was still seeking authority to enforce it.
The Children's Internet Protection Act (2000) requires libraries and schools to install Internet filtering software, if they are using E-rate discounts to purchase Internet access and computers. CIPA was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003, despite an attempt by the ALA to have it declared unconstitutional. CIPA requires the filtering software to be disabled on request for adult users, and in my local library system this is implemented with a simple mouse click.
Deleting Online Predators Act (H.R. 5319) is a bill introduced in 2006, that would require schools and libraries that receive E-rate discounts to prohibit access to certain resources such as "Commercial Social Networking Websites" and "Chat Rooms." DOPA requires disabling on request for adults similar to CIPA. DOPA is controversial, considered too broad by many, and has been kicked around in Congress a fair amount.
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. (John Gilmore)
The value of freedom of expression on the Internet should not be taken lightly. One of the best things about the Internet is that is seems to be poison to would-be dictators. The Internet is also profoundly populist—every user is his or her own publisher, with a global audience—and extremely hard to censor.
There's an interesting low-tech networking variation called FidoNet, which uses nothing but individual PCs and ordinary phone lines to pass electronic mail and discussion groups. FidoNet participation in general has been declining since the mid 1990s, but it's still popular in Russia. Areas under attempted censorship can also send news updates to mirror sites in the free world using simple modem connections; to stop those and/or FidoNet, you'd have to shut down the entire phone system of the country in question. See also the Wikipedia FidoNet article.
PICS is a content labeling protocol that was conceived as a functional alternative to censorship. The PICS standard itself is just a syntax for adding multi-valued labels to Internet resources.
PICS ... establishes Internet conventions for label formats and distribution methods, while dictating neither a labeling vocabulary nor who should pay attention to which labels. It is analogous to specifying where on a package a label should appear, and in what font it should be printed, without specifying what it should say. (from PICS: Internet Access Controls Without Censorship, by the World Wide Web Consortium, © 1996 by ACM, Inc.)
PICS is fundamentally a voluntary system, and unfortunately it's been little-used.
Anybody who wants to can design their own PICS ratings system, relative to the content topics that interest them. Content authors (Web page authors, for example) can tag their own content, using HTML tags included right in the page code, based on PICS systems designed for self-rating. Alternatively, any organization with the will and the funding can design or adopt a PICS-based rating system, set up a server on the Net, and start rating pages at large, uninvited. Content authors will generally be able to request to have their content rated by such a ratings service.
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This site has been PICS-labeled since 1996 |
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Two self-rating systems based on PICS:
Both of these systems identify particular topics and severity levels for ratings, and allow Web authors to PICS-label their own pages.
Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a newer W3C specification set useful for labeling resources including Web pages. RDF is part of an evolutionary development of Web techonology called Semantic Web, which apparently provides for Web resources to describe what they are about, in terms the browser can understand. If I understand correctly, replacing PICS may be one part of what RDF and Semantic Web will mean. See also the W3C Semantic Web site and the December 2007 issue of Scientific American.
Content-control software, also called censorware or Internet filter software, attempts to block access to Internet sites that have been identified as objectionable by somebody. Some filter packages were initially based on PICS entirely or in part. I believe current censorware is primarily based on blacklist databases of sites to be blocked, separately maintained by each vendor, often with text blacklist import and/or manual override.
Top rated:
Others to consider:
Problems with censorware:
Internet monitoring software relies on monitoring rather than blocking. Parents get to view a log of where their kids have been in cyberspace, and can follow links, view email et cetera.
You might also want to check out parental time control software, that simply restricts the time periods your kids are able to access the Internet. You can use it to make sure they only surf when you are there to supervise. If I had young children, I think this is the approach I might use, along with putting the computer in the living room or other public space, rather than in the kid's bedroom.
Censorware blocking packages often include monitoring and time control features. Presumably one could choose to use blocking at various levels for younger children, scaling back to time controls only for older kids.
Time controls and kids surfing with supervision could also be valuable when a blocking package fails to block objectionable content. (When the software blocks non-objectionable content, presumably you can count on your kids to bring that to your attention for an override.)
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