Lauren Weinstein: "Tags instead of Takedowns" -- Does anyone remember PICS?

Lauren posted a blog entry today, responding to the issues that caused Pakistan to accidentally wipe YouTube off the map for a few hours. He questions why we are bowdlerizing the internet to keep everyone happy. Yes, the companies who comply with foreign take-down notices have commercial reasons for doing so. But couldn't they find another way to keep insulted/shocked countries from limiting what the rest of us see?

So he's proposed that there be a mechanism for tagging content so that it can be avoided by those who don't want to see it.

But we've been here before. The system is called PICS, the "Platform for Internet Content Selection", and the 1.1 version was finalized by the W3 in 1996.

The third-party rating system in particular is perfect for Lauren's proposal. You could configure your browser to point at the rating body of your choice. (Imagine the possibilities—you could browse a web where only sites rated acceptable by FleshBot (NSFW) were visible!)

So, why isn't PICS built-in to every web browser and web site?

?

Okay, I confess, it was eleven years ago and I don't remember what happened. Internet Explorer did have support for it, perhaps it still does.

The real question is do we want it to be built-in to every browser? There's a very strong case to be made that once browsers have an easy way of censoring "bad" content, censorship of that content will become mandatory in large portions of society. Many governments (Australia and Britain recently, and of course multiple attempts in the U.S.) have made it clear that they don't trust parents to "protect" their own children. Adding content filters at the ISP-level would be an obvious and "simple" solution. Governments want to do it already; do we really want to make it easy for them?

The other issue is more practical, and I believe it will kill Lauren's proposal. Internet Services live and die on customer support. Which is to say that, for the main part, they die if they have to provide any. The overhead of providing a tagging and filtering service that can be used by any concerned government (or heaven forbid, organization) to complain about any content) is just too much to manage. And if the countries and organizations have to do it themselves, then they might as well just create a block-list of URLs and content words… oh wait, they already do that.

I understand the concerns that are driving the desire to compromise on content take-down. But fundamentally, I don't think it's a good idea. The risks of misuse are just too great.