PICS: Internet access controls without censorship

87 W ith its recent explosive growth, the Internet now faces a problem inherent in all media that serve diverse audiences: Not all materials are appropriate for every audience. Societies have tailored their responses to the characteristics of the various media [1, 3]. In most countries, there are more restrictions on broadcasting than on the distribution of printed materials. Any rules about distribution, however, will be too restrictive from some perspectives yet not restrictive enough from others. We can do better. We can meet diverse needs by controlling reception rather than distribution. In the TV industry, this realization has led to the V-chip, a system for blocking reception based on labels embedded in the broadcast stream. On the Internet, we can do better still, with richer labels that reflect diverse viewpoints and more flexible selection criteria. The Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS 1) establishes Internet conventions for label formats and distribution methods while dictating neither a labeling vocabulary nor who should pay attention to which labels. It is analogous to specifying where on a package a label should appear and in what font size it should be printed without specifying what it should say. The PICS conventions have caught on quickly. and other software vendors announced PICS-compatible products. AOL, AT&T WorldNet, CompuServe, MSN and Prodigy provide free blocking software that will be PICS-compliant by the end of 1996. RSACi and SafeSurf are offering their particular labeling vocabularies through online servers that produce PICS-formatted labels. A labeling infrastructure for the Internet offers a flexible means of content selection and viewing. Without Censorship 1 PICS is an effort of the WorldWide Web Consortium at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, drawing on the resources of a broad cross-section of the industry. Project history, a long list of supporting organizations, and details of the specifications may be found at http://w3.org/PICS.