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Protection of Children on the Net

Material that is potentially harmful to children exists on the Internet and is easily accessible. The Internet industry has responded to this problem with a wide array of filtering and blocking devices which enable parents, teachers and others concerned adults to screen out unwanted sites

Governments in many parts of the world are concerned about illegal and harmful material on the Internet and are considering ways to legislate or to encourage self-rating systems to develop. For the time being, most governments have been persuaded to delay hasty legislation that might restrict the growth of this new medium and, instead, promote the emergence of self-regulatory schemes that could provide a more flexible and workable solution

This would suggest that either the Internet industry finds ways to improve self-regulation or the potential for government intervention increases. For example in Europe, in 1997, the European Ministerial Conference issued the following statement outlining its belief in the role of the private sector in content management:

"Ministers stress the role which the private sector can play in protecting the interests of consumers and in promoting and respecting ethical standards, through properly-functioning systems of self regulation in compliance with and supported by the legal system. Ministers encourage industry to implement open, platform independent content rating systems, and to propose rating services which meet the needs of different users and take account of Europe’s cultural and linguistic diversity. They note that the EU Council Resolution of 17 February 1997 on illegal and harmful content on the Internet strongly supports such an approach." (EU Ministerial Conference, Bonn 6-8 July 1997)

In the United States, Vice President Al Gore has championed the active involvement of industry in self-regulatory efforts to protect children from potentially harmful content on the Internet. At the second White House Internet Summit in December 1997, Vice President Gore stated:

"Our challenge is to make these blocking technologies and the accompanying rating systems as common as the computersthemselves."

The World Wide Web Consortium’s development of the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS see www.w3.org) has opened up a new range of possibilities for consumers to customise their experience of the Net. Describing or rating content in site-based labels allows consumers to select, or de-select (filter) content according to their own settings in their browser.

The additional refinement of making the rating an objective description of the site contents allows consumers with different cultural and individual standards to apply their own subjective judgements through their browser settings. The prospect of an internationally acceptable rating and filtering system is opened up.

With a system based on voluntary rating by content providers and voluntary use of the filters in their browser by consumers, there are no barriers to publication or access to published material by adults. Free speech is preserved on the Internet, while children can be protected according to the standards that their parents determine. This approach is used by the current RSACi content rating system where webmasters self-rate using a detailed questionnaire and parents set the levels of acceptable content within their browser.

The World’s Leading Rating System ICRA has brought together a new funding regime and the best rating system currently available. It holds the intellectual property rights, name, trademarks and logos of the Recreational Software Advisory Council’s Internet rating system, RSACi.

RSACi is recognised as a leading system in its US home and has been widely adopted outside of the US, particularly in Europe. Independent evaluations by, eg, the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK and by the Bertelsmann Foundation (for the Carl Bertelsmann prize in 1998) have identified it as the best system available.

RSACi is a PICS-based, content-labelling system which is open, transparent to users and free for both content providers and parents alike. Over 100,000 sites have rated with RSACi world-wide, including a great number of the top 100 sites which account for 80% of the web’s traffic. Its distinctive logo can be found on thousands of web sites and is one of the most recognised and trusted logos on the web.

RSACi’s parental controls are built in to both Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator making RSACi freely available to 95% of Internet users. It is the only system integrated into both of the world’s leading browsers and the parental controls have been translated into most of the world’s major languages.