*********** http://pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1173,00.html The Netly News (http://netlynews.com) July 16, 1997 At The Censorware Summit by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) If you host a web page or publish online, be warned: soon your site might become invisible. Search engines won't index it and web browsers won't show it. Unless, that is, you agree to attach special labels to your web pages identifying how violent, sexually explicit, or inappropriate for kids your site is. This was the thrust of today's White House censorware summit, where President Clinton sat down with high tech firms and non-profit groups in a private meeting to talk about pressuring the Net community to make cyberspace childsafe through labels. "We need to encourage every Internet site, whether or not it has material harmful to minors, to rate its contents," Clinton said after the meeting. Vice President Gore was there, too, giving a quick demonstration of how labeling works. Spooked by the threat of a revised Communications Decency Act, high tech firms are seriously backing labels for the first time. Joining Clinton in coercing Internet users and businesses to label all their web pages were Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos. "I threw a gauntlet to other search engines in today's meeting saying that collectively we should require a rating before we index pages," Robert Davis, the president of Lycos, told me. Translation: if you don't play ball, and label your site, search engines will ignore you. As will future users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The next version of IE will default to displaying only properly labeled web pages, according to Ken Wasch, the president of the Software Publishers Association. Since many users won't turn off that feature to reach unrated sites, many large web sites now are facing hefty pressure to self-label. Other high tech firms rushed to join the presidential limelight. Netscape promised to join Microsoft and include label-reading software in the next version of its browser. America Online's Steve Case thanked Clinton for "backing industry's efforts to make cyberspace a safer place." IBM announced a $100,000 grant to RSACi, a PICS-based rating standard originally designed for video games but adapted for the Web. The industry giant also pledges to incorporate RSACi into future products. [...]