Commercial

Site-Rating System Slow to Catch On

By Whit Andrews

A universal site-rating technology is gaining its first footholds on the adults-only content roster of the Internet, but it still has a long way to climb.

Playboy, for instance, has tucked a version of the site ratings into every page's headers to keep out browser software that has been told to eschew whatever, if any, aspect of that page might be considered best for mature viewers only, such as nudity or sexual references.

But only one other such site out of more than 50 listed in the sex section of the Entertainment Magazine category at Yahoo has taken advantage of the Platform for Internet Content Selection, or PICS, rating system.

Webmasters at such sites with no PICS-compatible ratings for the most part professed ignorance of the system; a few said they're waiting for a PICS standard to develop.

But industry leaders are confident that with the release of PICS 1.1 and increasing interest in what it can do--which is more than simply serve as a platform for child-safe rating systems--use of it as a standard will increase.

Already, PICS support will be included in the next version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, and it has also been endorsed by Netscape. It is being talked about as the best way to control content of all kinds from the client side, by having adult site designers and marketers rate their own sites and passing along those ratings to clients. PICS is now being built into major site filtering software, and the first PICS developers conference was held last month.

This is how PICS works: A Web page author inserts PICS code at the top of a Web page, and software tacked onto or embedded in users' browsers reads that code.

The code in the page tells the browser's helper software, or the browser itself, whether the page is safe for the user to see. The safety criteria are set in advance on the client side by someone in authority, such as a teacher or parent.

What Internet players like about PICS is that content developers get to say for themselves how safe their stuff is, and the browsers check the code against an independent rating system stored at the client side. PICS itself is just a way to rate sites; the ratings themselves are considered and written by site designers to match criteria set by third parties, such as the Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC).

What stalls PICS is the fact that it requires work; Webmasters must individually rate each page of a site with the PICS code.

Here are some of the ways that PICS is gaining momentum:
The feature must be user- enabled, and may be configured so that it can be overridden by a "supervisor" with a password.
Specs does not read PICS code embedded into Web pages, but instead reads PICS code on a NewView server, which Specs checks before allowing access to any page. More than 135,000 pages and site sections have been rated so far, said Christine Conness, marketing programs manager for the company.
"You may just decide if it's not rated, you don't want to see it," Shafer explained.
Wait And See

Although Netscape has indicated support for PICS, the company has held off incorporating it into the Navigator 3.0 browser the way Microsoft did with Internet Explorer. "We're waiting to see how it shakes out in terms of how the sites are rated. It's definitely going to be in future releases," said Chris Hinton, a company spokeswoman.

Microsoft chose to forge ahead with the RSAC rating method as the default choice because of RSAC's record in rating computer games and because of its willingness to automate the rating process for users at its Web site, said Paul Balle, product manager, Microsoft Internet Platform and Tools division.

The software giant also is promoting the ratings system by asking site chiefs who want to carry the "Optimized for Internet Explorer 3.0" button whether they intend to use PICS ratings, Balle added.

Why is so much energy being expended on a nascent standard? Content developers hope PICS will be a successful alternative to legislation attempting to bar objectionable content from the Web.

"Self-rating is obviously the way to go to avoid government censorship," said Eileen Kent, vice president for new media at Playboy Enterprises in Chicago.

One of the decisions Webmasters find difficult is deciding which surf-control software to rate their sites with. Before the emergence of PICS, there were at least three major rating services, each of which maintained its own list of risque sites.

PICS cuts the work for site designers, Kent said, because sites generally only have to conform to RSAC guidelines--at least for now--to be interpreted by PICS-compatible filter software. Choose to do without it, she said, and filter software vendors are likely to perish.

She said PICS is the main, if not the only, future leader for client-side content control.

"If you write the PICS standard into your software, fine," Kent said. "If you don't, I find it hard to believe you're going to survive the shakeout."

How does Kent come to be so certain of a technology that few Webmasters even know about?

"It comes from MIT, which has got enough clout and savvy to proliferate this," she said.

And indeed the W3C--based in part at MIT--is working hard to promote the standard worldwide, said W3C chairman Albert Vezza, who acknowledged that PICS "doesn't have a lot of penetration yet."

That, he said, will change.

"I was just out in San Francisco talking to the Pathfinder folks, Disney. There was a big meeting of 50 or 60 people, mostly publishers, called the Internet Content Coalition, and they were very interested," he said.

Europeans are also interested, he said, not least because PICS gives the nations' variable temperaments the capability for variable filters. What a Swede wants her kids to see is very possibly different from what an Englishman wants his to see, Vezza said.

"The European Union is likely to push on its member states to deal with something using PICS," he said. Such a possibility is crucial on the Internet, where national boundaries already are used to avoid regulations on gambling, and where pornography could conceivably operate free of national laws.

"I think that this is just starting," he said. "We're at the beginning right now."
Reprinted from Web Week, Volume 2, Issue 9, July 8, 1996 © Mecklermedia Corp. All rights reserved. Keywords: government-regulation Date: 19960708

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