From: "Robin Whittle" <firstpr@ozemail.com.au>
Date: Sun, 8 Dec 1996 09:27:04 -0800 (PST)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: PICS is not censorship
Message-ID: <199612081726.EAA20762@oznet02.ozemail.com.au>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


I agree to a certain extent with Timothy May about the potential for
content labelling of Internet resources being made compulsory in the
US.  The country seems at times to be run be run by nutcases and
their elected representatives. There are huge swings in fashion
regarding prohibition, liberty etc.

To the extent that this is a risk, lets hope it is only an American
problem.  I understand that the Australian Broadcasting Authority
http://www.dca.gov.au/aba/invest.htm does not recommend compulsory
labelling.

thad@hammerhead.com (Thaddeus J. Beier) wrote:

> I suppose the a better solution would have been to have many competing
> private rating services, but PICS will work well, not put much load on
> the net, and is transparent and simple.  I like it.

This may be seen to imply that PICS is a ratings service or a single 
set of values.  It is not. PICS is a protocol for labelling things, 
either within themselves or labelling them remotely.  There can be 
any number of value systems for labelling things.  See my site for 
links to the PICS site and some discussion.

However, talk of "compulsory PICS" really must mean that all content 
be labelled with a PICS protocol label (presumably inside the 
resource itself) according to _at_least_one_ globally or nationally 
mandated value system.  Even with a descriptive rather than an 
evaluative value system (see ABA Chairman's recent speech at above 
link) I think it would take years to come up with a descriptive value 
system which would be generally useful for filtering material 
according to child protection, cultural specific issues (like 
Singapore banning horse race tipping and astrology) and protecting 
adults/employees from violence, erotica, gambling etc. etc.

Then the value system would be impossibly complex. Then, how would 
you decide whether something was properly labelled.  

This is probably off topic for Cypherpunks (if that is indeed 
possible) so I won't say any more.

- Robin


. Robin Whittle                                               .
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