I agree to a certain extent with Timothy May about the potential for content labelling of Internet resources being made compulsory in the US. The country seems at times to be run be run by nutcases and their elected representatives. There are huge swings in fashion regarding prohibition, liberty etc. To the extent that this is a risk, lets hope it is only an American problem. I understand that the Australian Broadcasting Authority http://www.dca.gov.au/aba/invest.htm does not recommend compulsory labelling. thad@hammerhead.com (Thaddeus J. Beier) wrote:

I suppose the a better solution would have been to have many competing private rating services, but PICS will work well, not put much load on the net, and is transparent and simple. I like it.

This may be seen to imply that PICS is a ratings service or a single set of values. It is not. PICS is a protocol for labelling things, either within themselves or labelling them remotely. There can be any number of value systems for labelling things. See my site for links to the PICS site and some discussion. However, talk of "compulsory PICS" really must mean that all content be labelled with a PICS protocol label (presumably inside the resource itself) according to _at_least_one_ globally or nationally mandated value system. Even with a descriptive rather than an evaluative value system (see ABA Chairman's recent speech at above link) I think it would take years to come up with a descriptive value system which would be generally useful for filtering material according to child protection, cultural specific issues (like Singapore banning horse race tipping and astrology) and protecting adults/employees from violence, erotica, gambling etc. etc. Then the value system would be impossibly complex. Then, how would you decide whether something was properly labelled. This is probably off topic for Cypherpunks (if that is indeed possible) so I won't say any more. - Robin . Robin Whittle . . http://www.ozemail.com.au/~firstpr firstpr@ozemail.com.au . . 11 Miller St. Heidelberg Heights 3081 Melbourne Australia . . Ph +61-3-9459-2889 Fax +61-3-9458-1736 . . Consumer advocacy in telecommunications, especially privacy . . . . First Principles - Research and expression - music, . . music industry, telecommunications . . human factors in technology adoption. . . . Real World Interfaces - Hardware and software, especially . . for music .