From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 8 May 1996 11:24:58 +0800
To: "Joseph M. Reagle Jr." <reagle@mit.edu>
Subject: Re: misunderstandings of PICS
In-Reply-To: <9605071940.AA18800@rpcp.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <199605072019.NAA16493@netcom5.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>        Two may be quite successfully accomplished using PICS. Europe
>(Germany and Nazis) and China/Singapore could make quite effective use of
>PICS if they require that all browsers in their country be sold with their
>rating (censorship) system included (and if they mandate that government
>label bureaus _must_ be used.)

well, in any case the idea that there should ever be any pressure
of page designers to include certain tags I find wholly inconsistent
with the original PICS proposal and rather abhorrent. unfortunately
it may be unavoidable.

> The reason self-rating is mentioned is to forestall the fear of
>mandated/arbitrary third party rating. Rather than some MPAA like system
>being imposed by the govt., the self-rating was a better political/strategic
>position. Also, self rating scales well until third party label bureaus are
>sufficiently developed. 

my fear is that the supposed "failure" of self-ratings could be twisted
by its opponents as evidence that it is inadequate to deal with the
real problem. in other words, they might say, "look, the self-rating
thing clearly doesn't work, people don't label their stuff right even
when they are pressured to, therefore we must now have a government
agency with mandatory controls. forget the 'rating server' idea, 
ratings by people within cyberspace just don't work".

I am not against self-ratings, I'm just saying that they seem to
be the area most ripe for being misunderstood by the public, or
lead to undesirable situations, and this is already happening.

its quite scary to me that the things that the designers were trying
to accomplish with the system might be totally reversed and
corrupted in practice to accomplish something they wouldn't have
wanted in their worst nightmares. I'd like to see an effort to
work against this to the greatest degree possible.