WASHINGTON -- A Web-rating system touted by Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and Yahoo as a way to protect children may be far less useful than its backers have claimed.
The companies predicted at a press conference Tuesday that parents will be able to configure their child's Web browser to reject sites that either lack ratings or are self-labeled as having unacceptable amounts of violence, sex or nudity.
"We think it's important for every Web property -- large and small -- to use (this) system to help ensure children have safe and age-appropriate experience online," said AOL Time Warner vice president Elizabeth Frazee.
But a closer look at the company's media properties illustrates the perils of trying to glue the Internet Content Rating Association's tags on all of the domains owned by a corporate organism as complex as AOL Time Warner.
AOL.com's bland homepage is rated as innocuous, reasonably enough, but HBO.com -- which uses the meta tag "g-string divas" in its Web page description and touts the racy Sex and the City series -- lacks any ICRA tags. WarnerBros.com highlights violent horror movies that children are barred from viewing in theaters, but has zero ICRA ratings that could ward off wayward youths.
ICRA tags are short snippets of text -- such as "n 0 s 0 v 0" for no nudity, sex or violence -- that a publisher can include in the HTML code of a website. Browsers like Internet Explorer read the ICRA tags and may prevent minors from continuing if the destination exceeds nudity-sex-violence levels set by parents.
To self-rate a site, a webmaster must answer questions like: Does your site feature descriptions or portrayals of deliberate injury to human beings? Deliberate damage to objects? Promotion of weapon use? Material that might disturb young children?
But since the questions are worded so broadly, they mean that the Pentagon's website and whitehouse.gov -- which contain clinical descriptions of deaths caused by anthrax, news articles about America's military actions, and promote using highly destructive weapons against the Taliban -- all of which could receive ratings as "violent." News articles about sexually transmitted diseases or former President Clinton's affair with an intern would be "sex" rated.
When asked about what news sites should do, ICRA technical director Phil Archer replied: "There is a big discussion on whether we should have a news context. The news organizations are opposed to it, but parents are for it. It was a big debate when the questionnaire was finalized. The questionnaire may change -- it's something we review."
Microsoft's MSNBC.com once attempted to use ICRA's ratings, but abandoned the practice about four years ago. Currently MSNBC.com and AOL Time Warner's CNN.com and Time.com do not use ratings -- even though their parent companies endorsed ICRA at Tuesday's press conference and their executives sit on the ICRA board of directors.
Yahoo, on the other hand, does ICRA-rate its dailynews.yahoo.com site. The rating claims that no news article or photograph describes any sort of sex, military action or violence, contains any expletives or promotes drinking, smoking or gambling.
That rating appears to be wrong.
Thousands of articles describe the U.S. military assault on the Taliban, sometimes including specific details about violence against people and property. A Village Voice article that appears on Yahoo contains this profanity-riddled passage: "You got your priorities fucked up.... You'll just be the piece of shit you are.... Tell me who and where you are and I'm going to come and jam it down your throat, motherfucker."
A spokesman for Yahoo could not immediately be reached for comment.
Yahoo said in a statement Tuesday that: "Creating safer places for children to use the Internet has long been a part of the overall experience Yahoo provides, and working with the industry to develop the ICRA standard and labeling protocol is just the next step in our efforts. We are pleased to give Internet users a way to customize their experience."
"It's up to Yahoo to label it if it's coming from them," said ICRA's Archer. "We use a binary system. That was one of the reasons we changed from RSACi (Recreational Software Advisory Council). The content provider is making a value judgment."
ICRA used to be known as the RSACi; its rating system originally was intended for video game violence and was designed after Congress began to complain. The nonprofit started talking up the idea of Internet ratings around 1995, but has had scant success so far.
To rate its pages, Yahoo must sign a legally binding contract in which it claims each of its ICRA ratings "must at all times reflect accurately the content it describes."
Archer didn't want to talk about Yahoo's news operations, but he said the general rule would be to contact an offending company and complain. "Ultimately, we could take them to court and get them to remove our copyright -- the tag remains our copyright," Archer said. "This has never happened but we do have that power through the courts."
After the low-brow rotten.com borrowed Disney's ICRA ratings two years ago, an ICRA lawyer responded with a letter that threatened a lawsuit alleging trademark, copyright and fraud. Rotten.com backed down.
The difficulty in determining what are legitimate Internet news sites and which online publishers do not have sufficiently high journalistic standards to qualify will doom ICRA, civil libertarians predict. After all, even rotten.com now features a news section, though the headlines do tend to run along the lines of "Postal worker jailed for flinging feces."
"If there's no news site exemption, then the whole system falls apart," says David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which generally opposes rating and filtering schemes. "If you don't come up with a tag that lets news through routinely, then browsers are going to block news sites because they're unrated."
"Who's going to determine the legitimacy?" Sobel asks. "That's where you open the door to the government getting involved. (ICRA) will be involved in some interesting litigation."
"Art or images containing nudity or presidential history about Oval Office blowjobs or the Library of Congress containing salacious reports by independent prosecutors would make it quite an impossible exercise," says Clinton Fein, publisher of annoy.com.
Put another way: How many parents will agree with a news exemption for the newsletter for the North American Man Boy Love Association, a publication the group says contains compelling "news, fiction, feature articles, pictures, reviews of films, recordings and books."
Other groups aren't as focused on the problems of .gov and news site ratings, and instead say the whole system is unworkable and intrusive.
"Whether it's third party or self-rating, filters are the most insidious censorship device around," says Marjorie Heins of the National Coalition Against Censorship, who co-authored a recent report on Internet filters.
"The problem is that at least with a criminal law, there has to be some attempt to define what's going to be prohibited and criminalized," Heins says. "There are all sorts of due process protections before you end up in the clink. This is turning over censorship to private parties."
In an attempt to inoculate themselves from criticism from free speech activists, ICRA invited noted First Amendment attorney Robert Corn-Revere to speak at Tuesday's press conference. Corn-Revere's presence was enough for ICRA to claim -- implausibly -- in their press release "broad support" from the "the First Amendment community."
Corn-Revere is a partner at the Washington law firm of Hogan and Hartson who teaches a First Amendment law course and is a strident critic of government censorship. This kind of filtering is different, Corn-Revere says, since the government's not coercing it.
"Labeling and filtering of Internet content that is truly voluntary is an approach that empowers parents and respects our fundamental commitment to free expression," Corn-Revere said in the press release.
But when pressed for details about how ICRA would impact news sites and other small publishers, Corn-Revere replied: "I'm not prepared to talk about whether this is a good rating system.... I wasn't there to endorse their product."
Ben Polen contributed to this report.
