At 02:05 PM 7/26/97 -0400,James Love wrote:

Suppose on the other hand that someone had a page that people thought should have a rating=adult tag. Well, the person who didn't use the tag would just have to deal with whatever crap you would get for not labeling. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^

That's not voulntary, as Tim stated.

If you thought your site had some constitutional right not to label the content adult, then just don't label it. I really don't think this will be that big an issue,

Unless you believe that voluntary ratings in order to get listed in a search engine are wrong.

but I don't know (no one knows). I think that a significant percent of porn sites would use the rating=adult label in a second if they thought it would get people off their back. Those that didn't use the label could just put up with the consequences, whatever they are. I would expect (and hope) that the rating=adult label would be used infrequently, mostly for sites involving explicit sexual images. I don't think a rating=adult label would be much of a barrier to teenagers who wanted access to this type of material, since one could download a browsers in a few minutes that wouldn't block the data. But like a childproof top on aspirin, it would work pretty well with pre-teens, I imagine.

Some pre-teens are smarter than that, and may thwart the system. Whose fault it it then if they see a page with porn on it?

Well, I for one don't like a Y=7 type system. It involves too much information from the person rating the wage page. The more precision you put in a rating system, the more trouble you get in. Keep it simple, very simple. What if someone was a sex with sheep web site, unlabeled? I don't care much. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if Yahoo didn't give them the prominent listing they wanted, in the absence of the rating=adult label.

Therefore, don't use yahoo. Use one that doesn't promote censorship.

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it would "solve" the problem, without legislation. I think it would be nice if the problem was solved without legislation. But if the problem (and I think there is a problem) isn't solved voluntarily, don't be shocked when Congress acts.

And I won't be shocked when the Supreme court strikes that down. The problem can be solved, just let parents monitor their kids access. If that happened, there would be no need for this censorware and rating crap.

Are you calling me a lazy parent? What is the obligation of a parent? To supervise a kids web browsing? Please, I think kids are better off with more privacy, and less parental (and teacher) supervision when they browse the web.

Well, if they have that privacy, they often go to a site with images that some people consider obscene. That's when the parents, unable to accept their mistake for not being responsible, blame the webpage's author.

This simply isn't true. A lot of support for content labeling, including systems which I find appalling, is from fairly typical parents. This isn't a right wing or born again issue.

Those parents probably are lazy in the first place.

Nothing will satisfy everyone. But reasonable people will support reasonable solutions, and it might be the case that there are enough reasonble people around to come up with a resonable system.

You seem to favor the "Let's just do this to avoid hassle" thing that law enforcement and government types try to promote. If we were to, "avoid the hassle" with webpage ratings, we might as well "avoid the hassle" of using PGP and such so that we don't anger the government anymore. I'm not labeling my webpage, and no dickhead is going to tell me to.