---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 14:05:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: American Journalism Review on perils of Internet ratings ======================================================================== http://www.newslink.org/ajrjdl21.html X-Rated Ratings? The Clinton administration and the Internet industry have championed voluntary ratings for Web sites to create a ``family-friendly'' environment in cyberspace. Their campaign nearly led online news organizations to create a licensing system for Web journalism. By J.D. Lasica From AJR, October 1997 WHEN PRESIDENT CLINTON challenged the high-tech industry this summer to create a ``family-friendly Internet'' by cleaning up cyber-smut and other offensive content, newspaper editorials applauded the president's decision to forgo government regulation and let private industry police the Net. Few realized that the White House's ``parental empowerment initiative'' would plunge online news publications headlong into the thorniest thicket of free speech issues in the history of cyberspace--and lead to the news media's rejection of the president's proposal when it comes to their own Web sites. The fate of an Internet self-rating system, however, remains far from settled. And the online news media's actions in recent weeks have been riddled with more intrigue than a John Le Carr* thriller--with the final chapters still unwritten. Consider the questions the online news world took up after the president's call for an Internet ratings system: How would Web news sites rate themselves for violence, language and sexual frankness when publishing stories involving war, murder, rape, gang shootings, domestic abuse, hate crimes and teenage pregnancy? If an exception is carved out for news sites, which sites would qualify? Where do you draw the line between news and information, entertainment, propaganda and opinion? And who decides? If news sites refuse to rate themselves, will they be shut off from a growing number of parents and others who are demanding filters on their Web browsers? Finally, will the entire ratings scheme transform the Net from a global democratic village into a balkanized, regulated medium where foreign despots can easily censor any material that strays from the party line? Questions like these are now being vigorously debated by online journalists who've barely had time to catch their breath after the U.S. Supreme Court slapped down the Communications Decency Act in June. The Clinton administration has adopted the approach championed by the Internet industry, which fears another effort by Congress to clamp down on ``indecent material'' in cyberspace. At the July 16 Internet summit at the White House, the president called on such companies as Netscape, America Online and IBM to give parents the tools needed to shield children from obscenity, violence and antisocial messages on the Net. ``We need to encourage every Internet site, whether or not it has material harmful to minors, to rate its contentsÉto help ensure that our children do not end up in the red-light districts of cyberspace,'' Clinton said. The assembled captains of industry obliged. Netscape indicated it would support Internet ratings in its next browser, meaning that about 97 percent of all browsers will support Internet ratings. (Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 already includes ratings as an option for parents to turn on.) The search engines Lycos, Excite and Yahoo! also fell into line, pledging to ask for ratings labels for all Web sites in their directories. [...]