The Web can be filthy, bawdy, offensive, disgusting and of course just really lame -- but Stephen Balkam, the head of an old nonprofit group that is announcing new efforts to "rate" websites, believes that the Internet can be categorized into submission.
Balkam is the CEO of the Internet Content Rating Association, or ICRA, which people like to pronounce as "IKE-ra." The group says its main aim is to protect kids who use the Internet from adult-oriented material, while at the same time protecting free speech.
To that end, on Thursday ICRA released the ICRAfilter, a free application that is designed to "read" the group's "global labeling system," a meta-tag-based taxonomy ICRA uses to describe content on the Internet.
During the past several years, as legislators considered mandatory filter use in public settings as a way to protect children from the ills of the Internet, civil libertarians, librarians and Internet activists have attacked what they see as software's faults: They said it often blocks too much without regard for context, it often doesn't take into account personal preferences and tastes, and it hampers free speech on the Internet.
ICRA hopes to fix those problems, Balkam said.
The group introduced its labeling system last year, and it says that already more than 50,000 websites, including many major adult sites, have implemented it. In order for a site to participate, it must describe its content in a number of specific areas, including nudity and sexual material, violence, foul language and hate.
Each of those categories is further divided into more specific definitions. A site that has nudity and sexual material, for example, can feature one or all of the following: erections or female genitals in detail, male genitals, female genitals, female breasts, bare buttocks, explicit sexual acts, obscured or implied sexual acts, visible sexual touching or, at the lowest level of perversion, passionate kissing.
The ICRAfilter sits at the operating-system level of a machine and, depending on preferences set by parents, can block access to any sites that match certain categories. If a mom doesn't want her kids to see sites that feature as their main attraction bare buttocks or visible sexual touching -- oh my! -- she may set her ICRAfilter to block out those lewd displays. Other parents, on the other hand -- those who may have come of age in an era of free love -- can let their kids see all the sex they want while still blocking out sites that, say, promote hate.
In addition, Balkam said, the IRCAfilter can be configured to allow and disallow certain sites all the time, and these allow and disallow lists can be compiled by third parties. On Thursday, the Anti-Defamation League announced its own disallow list for the IRCAfilter, which an ADL spokesman said has been compiled by the organization's experts "based on our long record of studying racism and anti-Semitism."
Balkam insists that his group is trying to strike a balance between the concerns of parents and the concerns of civil libertarians. His group is not in it for the money and doesn't charge for its software, and its advisory board is made up of prominent First Amendment defenders as well as representatives from the computer industry.
"We've taken a very open, democratic, modular approach, which is also culturally neutral," he said. "We do not create lists ourselves, we simply create a tool." That tool, he said, can be used by any parent to control a child's Internet activities to any degree; it's all up to the parent, Balkam said.
Karen Schneider, the coordinator of the Librarians' Index to the Internet and author of the Internet Access Cookbook, said that she saw ICRA as "misguided in a sincere sort of way. They honestly believe that there is a technical solution to this kind of problem."
Schneider thinks that there is no technical solution to the sticky problem of protecting children on the Internet, and that the sort of categorizations that ICRA proposes are fraught with subjectivity.
"What's 'partial nudity'?" she asked. "Is that top or bottom? Would that be one breast or two?"
In a similar vein, one can ask: How much sexual innuendo is too much such innuendo? How much passion must a kiss have before it's too "passionate"? What exactly is "material that might be perceived as setting a bad example for young children"?
"There are 147 million domains out there," Schneider said. "This system makes it bizarrely complicated. First someone's got to decide what their rating systems are for their own site. Now imagine matching it up to others' ratings. It's just too much, and people don't work that way."
Balkam recognizes these concerns, and he says that parents always have final say in overriding any blocks imposed by the software.
"That's fine," Schneider said of parental approval. "And if you're talking about yourself, I don't care what you do. Maybe you want to filter the world according to the ADL or Focus on the Family -- but the root problem with these is that people never want to stop there, they want to have it in libraries and schools, they want to have it for other people."
Next week, indeed, a federal district court in Philadelphia will hear the ACLU's complaint against just this sort of effort -- the Children's Internet Protection Act, the law Congress passed last year that requires libraries to install filtering software if they want to retain federal funds.
ICRA takes no position, Balkam said, on filtering in schools and libraries. But he did say that he wants the software everywhere; he'd like it distributed with Web browsers, with ISP accounts, and with new computers. By default, he said, it would block nothing -- but if parents wanted to use it, they could.
He said, too, that if the libraries are eventually required to install the software, the ICRAfilter would be a great choice for the simple reason that it's free.
Ironically, because ICRA's software is free, its other critics in this debate are the commercial filtering companies that could lose their paying customers.
Gordon Ross, the CEO of Net Nanny, whose filtering software retails for about $40, echoed the librarians' concerns about ICRA's rating system. "How do you rate every site that's out there?" Ross said. "It's virtually impossible to do. How do you maintain them? Who's doing it? And who's making the decision? I really get concerned when there's a third party there."
