A new life for old labels The resurrection of the ICRA rating and filtering system The international non-profit organisation ICRA ("Internet Content Rating Association") began promoting its self-rating & filtering tool during the second half of the 1990s. It was supported in this revolutionary concept for the protection of minors by Microsoft, Netscape/AOL, and British Telecom among others as well as by the European Union.

This concept is based on the idea that the decision as to whether a website is appropriate or not for a certain child is left to the provider of the website and the parents of that child. To that effect, the webmaster integrates some machine-readable code into his pages, in which he describes as impartially as possible what potentially unwanted contents the site contains, such as "exposed breasts", "depiction of alcohol use" or "profanity or swearing". In total, 37 such descriptors are available. On the other hand, parents can set their preferences in special software and indicate which contents they consider appropriate for their children and which not. On the basis of these preferences, the software then decides whether a website can be shown in the browser.

While the advantages of the system are obvious (efficient, democratic, free of cost, independent of language or operating system, transparent, independent of cultures and therefore applicable worldwide), pages labelled in this way are hard to come across. The aim of making the whole of the Internet childproof might have been too ambitious as well, and users also encountered problems with the software, especially due to the complexity of making the necessary settings.

Meanwhile, ICRA has become FOSI ("Family Online Safety Institute"), has gained new supporters (e.g. France Telecom and Télefónica) and works intensively on an expansion of the ICRA standard. In future, users and other stakeholders will also be able to label sites. A central server will then establish how trustworthy the labels the users have given to a site are. This is how the power of the Web 2.0 can be harnessed for child protection and the theories of the "Semantic Web" be translated into action.

On the user side, the Austrian provider association ISPA (also a partner of Saferinternet.at) and the centre for innovation and technology of the city of Vienna (ZIT) support the open source project "confoki", which is currently being developed in close cooperation with FOSI. confoki will provide an easy to install browser plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer, through which the parents can either set their own preferences or accept the presets from trustworthy organisations (e.g. parents' associations).

Secondly, confoki will answer the question how to find labelled sites by providing a specially developed search engine  which will exclusively index labelled websites and showing, in accordance with the plug-in, only sites which correspond to the user’s settings. This will give webmasters a greater incentive to label their sites, as the search engine will then give them added exposure. In the first version of confoki - the release is planned in autumn of this year - the "old" ICRA labels are still exclusively used. As soon as the new standard is online, confoki will also support it.

confoki: http://www.confoki.org/
ISPA: http://www.ispa.at/
FOSI: http://www.fosi.org/