'Thanks for This Important Commitment'

[Dave K-P <dkp@techie.com>]

'Thanks for This Important Commitment'

                     by Dan Brekke and Rebecca Vesely 
                     6:06pm  17.Jul.97.PDT Some words that came out of
                     President Clinton's mouth the other day signaled
                     that the Web's biggest search and directory
                     services were on board for a major effort to get
                     sites to rate themselves. 

                     "We ... need to encourage every Internet site,
                     whether or not it has material harmful for young
                     people, to label its own content," Clinton said
                     Wednesday at a White House event to announce
                     his new Net self-regulation initiative. "... To
help to
                     speed the labeling process along, several Internet
                     search engines - the Yellow Pages of cyberspace,
                     if you will - will begin to ask that all Web sites
                     label content when applying for a spot in their
                     directories." 

                     And then the self-described techno-idiot went on
                     to thank Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos "for this
                     important commitment." 

                     What the president and most of those who
                     reported the big news missed is that the
                     companies made no such commitment. Calls to
                     Yahoo's PR department minutes after the
                     president spoke for details on what the company
                     would do to get site owners to rate themselves
                     were met with puzzlement. Eventually, callers
                     were pointed to a press release issued in the
                     name of Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, and Excite that
                     pledged the companies would do ... almost
                     nothing. 

                     The release announced "an initiative to work
                     together to promote self-regulation of the
Internet."
                     Got that? The statement talked about the
                     importance of the First Amendment and how the
                     directories could make a difference "by making it
                     easy for Web site developers to rate themselves
                     and to identify their sites appropriately." 

                     Regardless of how wide of the mark they were,
                     Clinton's words did make news. And Thursday,
                     some of the directory mavens were trying to clarify
                     things. 

                     A spokeswoman for Excite said the search
                     engines will continue to monitor evolving plans on
                     how to keep kids from accessing pornography
                     online. 

                     "We have committed to a) finding a system or
                     systems for rating sites, and b) after finding that
                     system, allowing our users to voluntarily rate
                     themselves," said Jerry Yang, co-founder of
                     Yahoo.