Censorware Summit Take II, from The Netly News

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

***********

http://pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1173,00.html

The Netly News (http://netlynews.com)
July 16, 1997

At The Censorware Summit
by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)

     If you host a web page or publish online, be
warned: soon your site might become invisible. Search
engines won't index it and web browsers won't show it.
Unless, that is, you agree to attach special labels to
your web pages identifying how violent, sexually
explicit, or inappropriate for kids your site is.

     This was the thrust of today's White House
censorware summit, where President Clinton sat down
with high tech firms and non-profit groups in a
private meeting to talk about pressuring the Net
community to make cyberspace childsafe through labels.
"We need to encourage every Internet site, whether or
not it has material harmful to minors, to rate its
contents," Clinton said after the meeting. Vice
President Gore was there, too, giving a quick
demonstration of how labeling works.

     Spooked by the threat of a revised Communications
Decency Act, high tech firms are seriously backing
labels for the first time. Joining Clinton in coercing
Internet users and businesses to label all their web
pages were Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos. "I threw a
gauntlet to other search engines in today's meeting
saying that collectively we should require a rating
before we index pages," Robert Davis, the president of
Lycos, told me. Translation: if you don't play ball,
and label your site, search engines will ignore you.

     As will future users of Microsoft's Internet
Explorer browser. The next version of IE will default
to displaying only properly labeled web pages,
according to Ken Wasch, the president of the Software
Publishers Association. Since many users won't turn
off that feature to reach unrated sites, many large
web sites now are facing hefty pressure to self-label.

     Other high tech firms rushed to join the
presidential limelight. Netscape promised to join
Microsoft and include label-reading software in the
next version of its browser. America Online's Steve
Case thanked Clinton for "backing industry's efforts
to make cyberspace a safer place." IBM announced a
$100,000 grant to RSACi, a PICS-based rating standard
originally designed for video games but adapted for
the Web. The industry giant also pledges to
incorporate RSACi into future products.

[...]