PICS, Censorship, and Intellectual Freedom FAQ
PICS, Censorship, & Intellectual Freedom FAQ
Version
Editor
Date
1.0 - 1.14
Paul Resnick,
University of Michigan
last revised 04-Aug-99
Status of This Document
This Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) white paper answers common questions about PICS in
the context of intellectual freedom and censorship. It has no techincal standing
what-so-ever, such information is found in the specifications.
This document has no official W3C policy standing beyond describing the position the W3C
has taken to date.
Please send questions to pics-ask@w3.org .
Abstract
The published articles describing PICS (Communications of the ACM, Scientific American) have
focused on individual controls over the materials that are received on a computer. While
those articles also mention the possibility of more centralized controls (e.g., by
employers or governments), they describe only briefly the technical details and the
intellectual freedom implications of such centralized controls. The civil liberties
community has raised some alarms about those intellectual freedom implications. The goals
for this Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document are to:
Clarify some technical questions about individual and centralized content controls based
on PICS.
Argue that the net impact of PICS will be to shift government policies away from
centralized controls and toward individual controls, although this impact may be visible
only at the margins.
Describe how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
presents PICS in the public policy arena.
Background
In 1995, policies were proposed in several countries, including the USA, to restrict
the distribution of certain kinds of material over the Internet. In many but not all
cases, protection of children was the stated goal for such policies (see, for example, CIEC: Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition).
The focus on restricting inappropriate materials at their source is not well suited to
the international nature of the Internet, where an information source may be in a
different legal jurisdiction than the recipient. Moreover, materials may be legal and
appropriate for some recipients but not others, so that any decision about whether to
block at the source will be incorrect for some audiences.
PICS, the Platform for Internet Content
Selection, is a set of technical specifications that facilitate recipient-centered
controls on Internet content, rather than sender-centered controls. The following diagram
illustrates recipient-centered controls:
Filtering software sits between a child (or any Internet user) and the available
content. It allows access to some materials, and blocks access to other materials. Some
filtering software directly analyzes content, typically looking for particular keywords.
This FAQ, however, does not deal with that kind of software; it deals, instead, with
filtering software that decides what to allow and what to block based on two information
sources.
The first source is a set of descriptive labels that are associated with the materials.
Those labels may be provided by information publishers who describe their own work, or may
be provided by independent reviewers. A single document may have several labels associated
with it.
The second information source the filter uses is a set of filtering rules, which say
what kinds of labels to pay attention to, and what particular values in the labels
indicate acceptable or unacceptable materials.
PICS was not the first technology based on the idea of recipient-centered controls. For
example, SurfWatch was already on the market in the summer of 1995 when PICS development
began. It is based on a particularly simple set of labels: a list of URLs to avoid. As
another example, some firewalls that corporations had introduced for security purposes
blocked access to certain IP addresses. PICS provides a set of technical specifications so
that pieces of the picture could be provided by different entities, yet still work
together.
The first and most important distinction that PICS introduced is a separation between
labeling and filtering. A label describes the content of something. A filter makes the
content inaccessible to some audience. While both labeling and filtering may introduce
social concerns, the concerns are somewhat different. More generally, there are six roles
that could all be filled by different entities:
Set labeling vocabulary and criteria for assigning labels
Assign labels
Distribute labels
Write filtering software
Set filtering criteria
Install/run filtering software
PICS itself actually fills none of the six roles listed above! PICS is a set of
technical specifications that makes it possible for these roles to be played by
independent entities.
For example, RSACi and SafeSurf have each defined labeling vocabulary and criteria for
rating. They each wrote down a vocabulary in a machine-readable format that PICS
specifies. RSACi has four categories in its vocabulary, language, nudity, sex, and
violence; SafeSurf has more categories. Because they write down their vocabularies in the
PICS format, label distribution software (e.g., from IBM and Net Shepherd) and filtering
software (e.g., from Microsoft, IBM, and others) can process labels based on those
vocabularies. Even though RSACi and SafeSurf have each specified a labeling vocabulary and
criteria for assigning labels, neither of them actually assigns labels: they leave it up
to the authors of documents to apply to criteria to their own documents, or self-label as
PICS documents call it. Other services, such as CyberPatrol and Net Shepherd, take on both
of the first two roles, choosing the labeling vocabulary and employing people to actually
assign labels. The PICSRules specification provides a common format for expressing
filtering criteria, which makes it easy for one entity to set filtering criteria which are
then installed and run by someone else. For example, a parent might, with one mouse click
install filtering criteria suggested by some trusted organization, say a local church
group, even though that organization provides neither rating labels nor the filtering
software.
Questions and Answers
What PICS Enables
Can PICS be used for more than just content filtering?
Yes. While the motivation for PICS was concern over children accessing inappropriate
materials, it is a general "meta-data" system, meaning that labels can provide
any kind of descriptive information about Internet materials. For example, a labeling
vocabulary could indicate the literary quality of an item rather than its appropriateness
for children. Most immediately, PICS labels could help in finding particularly desirable
materials (see, for example, NetShepherd's
label-informed Alta Vista search), and this is the main motivation for the ongoing
work on a next generation label format that can include arbitrary text strings. More
generally, the W3C is working to extend Web meta-data
capabilities generally and is applying them specifically in the following projects:
Digital Signature
Project
coupling the ability to make assertions with a cryptographic signature block that
ensures integrity and authenticity.
Intellectual Property Rights Management
using a meta-data system to label Web resources with respect to their authors, owners,
and rights management information.
Privacy (P3)
using a meta-data system to allow sites to make assertions about their privacy
practices, and for users to express their preferences for the type of interaction they
want to have with those sites.
Regardless of content control, meta-data systems such as PICS are going to be an
important part of the Web, because they enable more sophisticated commerce (build and
manage trust relationships), communication, indexing, and searching services.
"The promise of digital commerce is that it will allow you to use the Internet to
purchase the services of the best organic gardening advisors or mad cow disease
specialists, whether they live in Santa Clara or Timbuktu. To do this, you need to do more
than verify that the person at the other end of the wire is who he says he is. You need to
assess competence, reliability, judgment. In other words, you need a system of branding,
but applied much more widely for highly specialized and hard-to-evaluate services and
products. You need value-added services that will not only lead you to the right product
or service but also rate its quality or otherwise vouch for it."
Francis Fukayama
(Forbes ASAP 12/96 p 69)
Does PICS enable censorship?
This seemingly straightforward question, upon closer inspection, turns out to be many
different questions when asked by different people. Many people are concerned about
governments assuming one or more of the roles described in the answer to the previous
question. Others are concerned about employers setting filtering rules, abuse of power by
independent labelers, or a chilling effect on speech even if speech is not banned
outright. People also employ different definitions of censorship. The most expansive
definition is, "any action by one person that makes otherwise available information
unavailable to another person." Under this expansive definition, even a parent
setting filtering rules for a child would count as censorship. PICS documents have adopted
the more restrictive definition of censorship as actions that limit what an individual can
distribute, and use the term "access controls" for restrictions on what
individuals can receive. But the distinction blurs if a central authority restricts access
for a set of people. Finally, people have different definitions of "enable."
Some would say that PICS enables any application that uses PICS-compatible components,
while we reserve the term "enables" for applications that can easily be
implemented with PICS-compatible components but could not be easily implemented otherwise.
Given the variety of implicit questions, it doesn't make sense to provide a blanket
answer to the question of whether PICS enables censorship. This FAQ answers many of the
specific questions that people often mean when they ask the more general question. For
example, we ask questions about whether PICS makes it easier or harder for governments to
impose labeling and filtering requirements. If you believe there's another specific
question that should be addressed, please send it to pics-ask@w3.org,
for possible inclusion in a later version.
Could governments encourage or impose receiver-based controls? Does PICS make it
easier or harder for governments to do so?
Yes. A government could try to assume any or all of the six roles described above,
although some controls might be harder than others to enforce. As described below,
governments could assume some of these roles even without PICS, while other roles would be
harder to assume if PICS had not been introduced. It's important to note that W3C does not
endorse any particular government policy. The purpose of this FAQ is to explain the range
of potential policies and to explore some of the impacts of those policies on both the
climate of intellectual freedom and the technical infrastructure of the World Wide Web.
Potential government policies:
Set labeling vocabulary and criteria. A government could impose a labeling vocabulary
and require all publishers (in the government's jurisdiction) to label their own materials
according to that vocabulary. Alternatively, a government might try to achieve the same
effect by encouraging an industry self-policing organization to choose a vocabulary and
require subscribers to label their own materials. Civil liberties advocates in Australia
are especially concerned about this (see The Net Labeling Delusion).
PICS makes it somewhat easier for a government to impose a self-labeling requirement:
without PICS, a government would have to specify a technical format for the labels, in
addition to specifying the vocabulary and criteria, and there might not be any filtering
software available that could easily process such labels.
Assign labels. A government could assign labels to materials that are illegal or
harmful. This option is most likely to be combined with government requirements that such
materials be filtered (see #5 below) but it need not be; a government could merely provide
such labels as an advisory service to consumers, who would be free to set their own rules,
or ignore the labels entirely. If a government merely wants to label, and not impose any
filtering criteria, then PICS again provides some assistance because it enables a
separation of labeling from filtering. On the other hand, a government that wishes to
require filtering of items it labels as illegal gets little benefit from PICS as compared
to prior technologies, as discussed below in the question about
national firewalls.
Distribute labels. A government could operate or finance operation of a Web server to
distribute labels (a PICS label bureau); the labels themselves might be provided by
authors or independent third parties. Taken on its own, this would actually contribute to
freedom of expression, since it would make it easier for independent organizations to
express their opinions (in the form of labels) and make those opinions heard. Consumers
would be free to ignore any labels they disagreed with. Again, since PICS separates
labeling from filtering, it enables a government to assist in label distribution without
necessarily imposing filters. If combined with mandatory filtering, however, a
government-operated or financed label bureau could contribute to restrictions on
intellectual freedom.
Write filtering software. It's unlikely that a government would write filtering software
rather than buying it; the supplier of filtering software probably has little impact on
intellectual freedom.
Set filtering criteria. A government could try to impose filtering criteria in several
ways, including government-operated proxy servers (a national intranet), mandatory
filtering by service providers or public institutions (e.g., schools and libraries), or
liability for possession of materials that have been labeled a particular way. In some
ways, by enabling independent entities to take on all the other roles, PICS highlights
this as the primary political battleground. Each national and local jurisdiction will rely
on its political and legal process to answer difficult policy questions: Should there be
any government-imposed controls on what can be received in private or public spaces? If
so, what should those controls be? Most kinds of mandatory filters could be implemented
without PICS. A government could express its required filtering criteria in the form of a
PICSRule that everyone would be required to install and run, but without PICSRules a
government could express its requirements in less technical form. One potential policy,
however, mandatory filtering based on labels provided by non-government sources, would
have been difficult to impose without PICS.
Install/run filters. A Government could require that filtering software be made
available to consumers, without mandating any filtering rules. For example, a government
could require that all Internet Service Providers make filtering software available to its
customers, or that all PC browsers or operating systems include such software. Absent
PICS, governments could have imposed such requirements anyway, since proprietary products
such as SurfWatch and NetNanny are available.
Since PICS makes it easier to implement various kinds of controls, should we expect
there to be more such controls overall?
Yes; all other things being equal, when the price of something drops, more of it will
be consumed.
Does PICS encourage individual controls rather than government controls?
Yes; for example, a national proxy-server/firewall combination that blocks access to a
government-provided list of prohibited sites does not depend on interoperability of labels
and filters provided by different organizations. While such a setup could use
PICS-compatible technology, a proprietary technology provided by a single vendor would be
just as effective. Other controls, based on individual or local choices, benefit more from
mixing and matching filtering software and labels that come from different sources, which
PICS enables. Thus, there should be some substitution of individual or local controls for
centralized controls, although it is not obvious how strong this substitution effect will
be. In Europe initial calls for centralized controls gave way to
government reports calling for greater reliance on individual recipient controls; the end
results of these political processes, however, are yet to be determined.
Labeling
Does it matter whether labels are applied to IP addresses or to URLs?
An IP address identifies the location of a computer on the Internet. A URL identifies
the location of a document. To simplify a little, a URL has the form
http://<domain-name>/<filename>. A web browser first resolves (translates) the
domain-name into an IP address. It then contacts the computer at that address and asks it
to send the particular filename. Thus, a label that applies to an IP address is a very
broad label: it applies to every document that can be retrieved from that machine.
Labeling of URLs permits more flexibility: different documents or directories of documents
can be given different labels.
This difference of granularity will, naturally, have an impact on filtering. Filters
based on IP addresses will be cruder: if some but not all of the documents available at a
particular IP address are undesirable, the filter will have to either block all or none of
those documents. PICS, by contrast, permits labeling of individual URLs, and hence permits
finer grain filters as well.
Self-labeling
Does PICS make author self-labeling more effective?
Yes. Without a common format for labels, authors could not label themselves in a way
that filtering programs could make use of. PICS provides that format.
Does PICS make a government requirement of self-labeling more practical to implement?
It enables such a requirement to have more impact. A government requirement of
self-labeling would have little impact if the labels were not usable by filtering
programs. PICS provides the common format so that filtering software from one source can
use labels provided by other sources (authors in this case).
Does self-labeling depend on universal agreement on a labeling vocabulary and criteria
for assigning labels to materials?
Although universal agreement is not necessary, there does need to be some harmonization
of vocabulary and labeling criteria, so that labels provided by different authors can be
meaningfully compared.
Does PICS make it easier for governments to cooperate in imposing self-labeling
requirements?
Yes. PICS provides a language-independent format for expressing labels. If governments
agreed on a common set of criteria for assigning labels, the criteria could be expressed
in multiple languages, yet still be used to generate labels that can be compared to each
other.
Is it effective for (some) authors to label their own materials as inappropriate for
minors? What about labeling appropriate materials?
Both kinds of labeling could be effective, but only if a high percentage of the
materials of a particular type are labeled. If the inappropriate materials are labeled,
then a filter can block access to the labeled items. If the appropriate materials are
labeled, then a filter can block access to all the unlabeled items.
Third-party labeling
Can an organization I dislike label my web site without my approval?
Yes. Anyone can create a PICS label that describes any URL, and then distribute that
label to anyone who wants to use that label. This is analogous to someone publishing a
review of your web site in a newspaper or magazine.
Isn't there a danger of abuse if a third-party labeler gets too powerful?
If a lot of people use a particular organization's labels for filtering, that
organization will indeed wield a lot of power. Such an organization could, for example,
arbitrarily assign negative labels to materials from its commercial or political
competitors. The most effective way to combat this danger is to carefully monitor the
practices of labeling services, and to ensure diversity in the marketplace for such
services, so that consumers can stop using services that abuse their power.
Other Social Concerns About Labeling
Why did PICS use the term "label", with all of its negative associations?
PICS documents use the term "label" broadly to refer to any machine-readable
information that describes other information. Even information that merely classifies
materials by topic or author (traditional card catalog information) would qualify as
labels if expressed in a machine-readable format. The PICS developers recognized that the
term "label" has a narrower meaning, with negative connotations, for librarians
and some other audiences, but it was the most generic term the PICS creators could find
without reverting to technical jargon like "metadata."
In media with centralized distribution channels, such as movies, labeling and filtering
are not easily separated. For example, unrated movies are simply not shown in many
theaters in the USA. In addition to its technical contribution, PICS makes an intellectual
contribution by more clearly separating the ideas of labeling and filtering. Many of the
negative connotations associated with "labeling" really should be associated
with centralized filtering instead. There are, however, some subtle questions about the
impact of labeling itself, as articulated in the next two questions.
Does the availability of labels impoverish political discussions about which materials
should be filtered?
Matt Blaze (personal communication) describes this concern with an analogy to
discussions at local school board meeting about books to be read in a high school English
class. Ideally, the discussion about a particular book should focus on the contents of the
book, and not on the contents of a review of the book, or, worse yet, a label that says
the book contains undesirable words.
There will always be a tradeoff, however, between speed of decision-making and the
ability to take into account subtleties and context. When a large number of decisions need
to be made in a short time, some will have to be made based on less than full information.
The challenge for society, then, will be to choose carefully which decisions merit full
discussion, in which case labels should be irrelevant, and which decisions can be left to
the imperfect summary information that a label can provide. The following excerpt from Filtering the Internet
summarizes this concern and the need for eternal vigilance:
"Another concern is that even without central censorship, any widely adopted
vocabulary will encourage people to make lazy decisions that do not reflect their values.
Today many parents who may not agree with the criteria used to assign movie ratings still
forbid their children to see movies rated PG-13 or R; it is too hard for them to weigh the
merits of each movie by themselves.
Labeling organizations must choose vocabularies carefully to match the criteria that
most people care about, but even so, no single vocabulary can serve everyone's needs.
Labels concerned only with rating the level of sexual content at a site will be of no use
to someone concerned about hate speech. And no labeling system is a full substitute for a
thorough and thoughtful evaluation: movie reviews in a newspaper can be far more
enlightening than any set of predefined codes."
Will the expense of labeling "flatten" speech by leaving non-commercial
speech unlabeled, and hence invisible?
This is indeed a serious concern, explored in detail by Jonathan Weinberg in his law
review article, Rating the Net. The
following excerpt from Filtering
the Internet acknowledges that materials of limited appeal may not reach even the
audiences they would appeal to, but argues that labeling is merely a symptom rather than a
cause of this underlying problem:
"Perhaps most troubling is the suggestion that any labeling system, no matter how
well conceived and executed, will tend to stifle noncommercial communication. Labeling
requires human time and energy; many sites of limited interest will probably go unlabeled.
Because of safety concerns, some people will block access to materials that are unlabeled
or whose labels are untrusted. For such people, the Internet will function more like
broadcasting, providing access only to sites with sufficient mass-market appeal to merit
the cost of labeling.
While lamentable, this problem is an inherent one that is not caused by labeling. In
any medium, people tend to avoid the unknown when there are risks involved, and it is far
easier to get information about material that is of wide interest than about items that
appeal to a small audience."
Filtering
What is PICSRules?
PICSRules is a language for expressing filtering rules (profiles) that allow or block
access to URLs based on PICS labels that describe those URLs. The purposes for a common
profile-specification language are:
Sharing and installation of profiles. Sophisticated profiles
may be difficult for end-users to specify, even through
well-crafted user interfaces. An organization can create a recommended
profile for children of a certain age. Users who
trust that organization can install the profile rather than specifying
one from scratch. It will be easy to change the active
profile on a single computer, or to carry a profile to a new computer.
Communication to agents, search engines, proxies, or other servers.
Servers of various kinds may wish to tailor
their output to better meet users' preferences, as expressed in a
profile. For example, a search service can return only
links that match a user's profile, which may specify criteria based on
quality, privacy, age suitability, or the safety of
downloadable code.
Portability betwen filtering products. The same profile will
work with any PICSRules-compatible product.
Does PICS make national firewalls easier to implement?
No, but an effective national firewall would make it possible for a government to
impose PICS-based filtering rules (or non PICS-based filtering rules) on its citizens. A
firewall partitions a network into two components and imposes rules about what information
flow between the two components. The goal of a national firewall is to put all the
computers in the country into one component, and all computers outside the country into
the other component. This is difficult to do, especially if people deliberately try to
find out connections (e.g., telephone lines) between computers inside the country and
those outside the country. Given a successful partition, however, PICS could be used to
implement the filtering rules for a firewall. In particular, the government could identify
prohibited sites outside the country that people inside the country could not access; such
a filtering could be implemented based on PICS-formatted labels or, without relying on
PICS-compatible technology, with a simple list of prohibited URLs.
Does PICS make national firewalls easier to implement?
No. PICSRules can provide a way to express filtering preferences, but has no impact on
the ability of a government to partition the computers inside a country from those outside
the country.
Does PICS enable ISP compliance with government requirements that they prohibit access
to specific URLs?
ISP compliance with government prohibition lists is already practical, even without
PICS. It would also be possible to comply using PICS-based technologies. PICS does make it
easier for ISPs to comply with a government requirement to block access to sites labeled
by non-governmental entities (including those that are self-labeled by the authors of the
sites).
Does PICSRules enable ISP compliance with government requirements that they prohibit
access to specific URLs?
Governments can make such requirements with or without PICSRules. PICSRules does make
it possible for governments to precisely state filtering requirements, and perhaps
simplify ISP compliance with changing government requirements, if the ISP implements a
general interpreter for the PICSRules language.
Are proxy-server based implementations of PICS filters compatible with the principle
of individual controls?
Yes. PICS enables mixing and matching of the five roles. In particular, a service
provider could install and run filtering software on a proxy server, but allow individuals
to choose what filtering rules will be executed for each account. AOL already offers a
primitive version of this idea, not based on PICS; parents can turn the preset filtering
rules on or off for each member of the family.
Are client based implementations of PICS filters usable only for individual controls?
No. Governments could require the use of filters on clients. The city of Boston, for
example, requires public schools to install a client-based filtering product on all
computers with Internet access, and requires public libraries to install a client-based
filtering product on all computers designated for children.
Does my country have a right to filter what I see?
W3C leaves this question to the political and legal processes of each country. Some
people argue that unrestricted access to information is a fundamental human rights
question that transcends national sovereignty. W3C has not adopted that position.
Does my employer have a right to filter what I see?
W3C leaves this question to the political and legal processes of each country.
W3C's Roles and Responsibilities
How does W3C view its role in policy debates about intellectual freedom?
W3C's mission is to "realize the full potential of the Web." The following
two points are taken from a talk by
Jim Miller at the WWW6 conference:
We wish to provide tools which encourage all cultures to feel free to use the Web while
maintaining an inter-operable network architecture that encourages diversity without
cultural fragmentation or domination
We provide feedback to policy makers regarding what is technically possible, how
effective the technology may be in satisfying policy requirements, and the possible
unintended consequences of proposed policies
Thus, for example, when discussing the CDA-type legislation with government officials
in the U.S. or abroad, it is appropriate for W3C to point out that sender-based
restrictions are not likely to be effective at keeping all materials of a particular kind
away from children, and that there could be unintended consequences in terms of chilling
free speech or keeping the Web from reaching its full potential as a medium for
communication and cultural exchange. W3C does not, however, debate with government
officials about their perceived policy requirements. For example, Germany has a policy
requirement of restricting access to hate speech while the U.S. does not: W3C does not try
to convince either country that the other country's choice of policy requirements is
better.
Why does the CACM article suggest that governments might use blocking technology?
Some people(see The Net
Labeling Delusion) have criticized the following paragraph from the CACM article on
PICS:
Not everyone needs to block reception of the same materials. Parents may not wish to
expose their children to sexual or violentimages. Businesses may want to prevent their
employees from visiting recreational sites during hours of peak network usage. Governments
may want to restrict reception of materials that are legal in other countries but not in
their own. The “off” button (or disconnecting from the entire Net) is too crude:
there should be some way to block only the inappropriate material. Appropriateness,
however, is neither an objective nor a universal measure. It depends on at least three
factors:
1. The supervisor: parenting styles differ, as do philosophies of management and
government.
2. The recipient: what’s appropriate for one fifteen year old may not be for an
eight-year-old, or even all fifteen-year-olds.
3. The context: a game or chat room that is appropriate to access at home may be
inappropriate at work or school.
The main point of this section is to underscore the fact that people disagree about
what materials are appropriate in what contexts. This point is illustrated at several
levels of granularity: invidual children, organizations, and governments. The critcism
focuses on the mention of possible government blocking, which did not appear in an earlier
draft of the paper. We believe the example about differences in laws between countries is
useful in explaining why there is a need for flexible, receiver-based controls rather than
the kind of sender-based controls (e.g., the CDA) that most policy discussions were
focusing on at the time.
The objection to the use of this example rests on an argument that governments should
never designate any content as illegal. That argument is not widely accepted (in the U.S.,
for example, "obscenity" laws have been deemed constitutional, even though the
CDA's "indecency" provisions were not). A more widely held position is that
governments should not restrict political materials as a means of controlling their
citizens. W3C leaves discussions about which materials should be illegal in a particular
country to the political realm rather than the technological realm. W3C does, however,
point out to policy makers, however, that it's not necessary to make materials illegal if
they are offensive to some people but not others: end-user controls are a more flexible
method of handling such materials.
Could W3C have controlled the uses of PICS by licensing the technology?
Licensing such a technology was not considered to be a feasible option during the time
of the CDA. Not only would it have undercut the "neutrality" and appeal of the
technology, the W3C then would have had to be in the position of determining who should
and should not use it; this is not a role the W3C is competent to play.
Is the W3C promoting the development of PICS into proxy server products?
Yes. W3C is pleased that IBM
has introduced a proxy server that can filter based on PICS labels, and encourages the
development of other PICS-compatible servers. As discussed above, filter processing can be
centralized at a proxy server while still permitting individuals to choose the filtering
rules.
What can I do now to promote uses of PICS that promote, rather than harm, intellectual
freedom?
In addition to acting in the political arena, it would probably be helpful to implement
positive uses of labels, such as searching applications. It is surpassingly difficult for
people unfamiliar with computers to imagine new applications. By building prototypes and
demonstrating them, it may be possible to focus policy-makers' energies on those uses of
technology that accord with your political values.
What else can I read about labeling, filtering, and intellectual freedom?
Governments
European Commission
Report (follow-on document of 20 March, 1997)
Australian Broadcast Authority report on
its investigation into on-line services
European Parliament
Green Paper: the Protection of Minors and Human Dignity in Audiovisual and Information
Services
European Union Communication on
illegal and harmful content on the Internet
Report of European
Commission Working party on illegal and harmful content on the internet
Working Party Report
European Commission Forum for
Exchange of Information on Internet Best Practices
Media
PICS Walks Fine Line
on Net Filtering
Good Clean PICS:
The most effective censorship technology the Net has ever seen may already be installed on
your desktop (Simson Garfinkel in HotWired: February 1997)
College Hill interview with
Joseph Reagle, W3C staff member
Individuals and Organizations
EFF's Draft Policy on
public interest principles for online filtration, ratings, and labeling systems.
Suggested guidelines for responsible use of labeling and filtering.
The Internet Filter Assessment Project.
A group of librarians with mixed feelings about filtering examined several products in
detail and discussed the issues facing libraries.
ACLU White Paper Critical of
Labeling and Filtering
PICS-Aware Proxy System vs. Proxy
Server Filters. Wayne Salamonsen and Roland Yeo, proceedings of INET '97.
Metadata, PICS and Quality. Chris
Armstrong. Ariadne magazine, May 1997.
Rating the Net. Jonathan
Weinberg. in Hasting Communications and Entertainment Law Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, p.
453-482. (A balanced but critical academic's look at rating systems and their legal and
social impact.)
The Net Labeling Delusion
(anti-PICS web site in Australia)
The Net Censorship Dilemma
(anti-censorship site by the same editor as the site above)
Fight-censorship mailing lists
(Declan McCullagh's moderated and unmoderated lists; occasional discussion of PICS and
related technologies).
<pics-ask@w3.org>
$Date: 1999/08/04 16:13:19 $
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