PICS

Many of the filters, blocking mechanisms and other content management regimes highlighted in our censorship guide are based on the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), a metadata-based standard for internet content.  

PICS was developed in association with the World Wide Web Consortium as part of that body's interest in the 'architecture' of the Internet. Despite W3C endorsement it's never really got off the ground. 

It provides for tagging of web pages, eg allows them to be labelled as containing violent or sexually-explicit material and thereby excludes access from particular browsers. It does not specify the nature of the labels or their derivation.

PICS is a building block for the Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC) rating scheme administered by the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA), an industry body concerned with the invidious task of developing a viable content 'advisory' scheme, alerting surfers that there may be something unpleasant in the waters ahead.

ICRA's received some degree of endorsement from the EU, along with the inevitable denunciations from zealots who regard any content identification tool as tantamount to book burning. As we noted in our censorship guide, the 2000 report of the ICRA Advisory Board, drawing on the 'Best Practices' model (RTF) developed by the Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale's Law School, was construed by some as 'back to the drawing board'.

In December 2000 ICRA released a more sophisticated rating framework with endorsement by the CDT, arguably a major step forward. In February 2001 that framework was extended to several languages other than English.

Lawrence Lessig's Tyranny In The Infrastructure article in WIRED is an assessment of PICS by one of the more influential US legal polemicists, author of Code & Other Laws Of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books 99).




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