A web-rating system promoted by Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and
Yahoo as efficient at protecting children form adult content
websites has been criticised. The rating system was promoted by the
companies on Tuesday of this week as “important for every web
property, large and small…to help ensure that children have safe
and age-appropriate experience on-line,” by AOL’s VP.
However, the system has been challenged by critics as
insufficient to describe contents of a web page that belongs to a
large corporation with diverse interests. For instance, the website
of www.WarnerBros.com contains links to films that children of
below a certain age could not view in a cinema, yet, the website
does not exhibit any of the Internet Content Rating Association’s
tags touted by Microsoft and AOL.
The internet content rating tags (ICRA’s) work on the basis of
self application, a site provider must answer particular questions
in order to determine whether the site, for example, “portrays
deliberate injury to human beings” however, it is said that
problems occur because these questions are so widely worded leading
to ambiguous results.
Incidentally, neither Microsoft’s www.msnbc.com, AOL Time
Warner’s www.cnn.com nor www.time.com use the ratings system.
