Nice

[andrewducker]

Of all the stupid ideas to finish out the year with, the British government is considering age ratings for websites. I really do hope that this is the random thought of one person, rather than something serious.

Does anyone actually need me to explain why this is impossible?  Or ridiculously stupid?  Or can I take it as read?

Edit: I have nothing against self-certification. ICRA metadata is absolutely fine by me. It's just clear that it shouldn't be mandatory. Now, if it was _assumed_ by a "kid browser" that all sites were purveyors of filth, unless they self-certified as being porn-free/violence-free/etc. then I could live with that, because adults wouldn't surf with filters on. That's the only technical solution I can think of that has a hope in hell of working.

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

No, it's clearly unworkable.

I remember the last time this was dragged up in the US. We got the Communications Decency Act, the PICS labelling scheme, and the RSACi rating vocabulary. I can't speak for the CDA, but the latter two are now dead, dead, dead.

PICS used to be supported in earlier versions of IE, but it's considered obsolete. Virtually noone puts PICS labels on their sites (virtually noone ever did), and the technology itself was left in the dust of the Semantic Web (there's a technical side issue that the approach the SW eventually took made it very difficult to achieve the same expressivity as PICS, but that's a side issue).

RSAC no longer exists, having been rolled into ICRA. They still publish a vocabulary, but it's not clear whether it is used. On the plus side, it was a relatively fine-grained vocabulary that could be used to rate a site on multiple criteria (rather than the blunt instrument of the BBFC age ratings).

However, although PICS is dead, the W3C are working on a replacement (POWDER) that is compatible with the rest of the SW. It's been in development for more than a year so far, and hasn't got beyond a working draft, which isn't a particularly good sign, however (long-running working groups have a tendency to produce over-elaborate specifications that are widely implemented).

The question of how or why one should trust self-ratings, or how third party rating can be made to scale are still left as an exercise for the reader.