PICS Standards Summary

America Online is a member of PICS (The Platform for Internet Content Selection), an industry working group dedicated to the development of technologies that give users control over the kinds of material they and their children have access to online.

The PICS group saw the need for a platform to rate content of diverse communities that have different perspectives toward what is appropriate for them and their children. Such tools are important to the continued growth of Internet and online service use in homes, schools, and businesses and offer a positive alternative to U.S. government regulation of online content. To reach this goal, representatives from twenty-three companies and organizations
gathered in August 1995 under the auspices of MITs (Massachusetts Institution of Technology) World Wide Web Consortium to discuss the need for content labeling. The PICS standard establishes conventions for label formats and distribution methods and allows rating systems to be voluntary. It is analogous to specifying where on a package a label should appear, and in what font it should be printed, without specifying what it should say.

PICS standards will use the open and interactive nature of the Internet to rate content in a way that can be used with blocking software and still provide an experience suitable to any audience on the Internet. The standards will be self-rating, enabling content providers to voluntarily label the content they create and distribute. PICS will also facilitate third-party rating, enabling civic groups and other organizations to associate additional labels with content created and distributed by others. Finally, PICS standards will be easy-to-use,
enabling parents and teachers to use ratings and labels from a diversity of sources to control the information that children access under their supervision.

For more information on PICS please contact URL: http://www.w3.org/PICS/principles.html