Comment by Scaled

9 hours ago

FYI for adult content, there's a standard called RTA-Label that already integrates with all parental controls and is already deployed on all major adult sites.

8 comments

Scaled

Reply
fc417fc802  9 hours ago

Yes but isn't that limited to only tagging adult sites? That's great and it works but it only applies to a small piece of the stated problem. It seems to be largely social media that's driving popular support for this latest go round.

RTA is an excellent demonstration that a self categorization system can be expected to work provided it's standardized and service operators make use of it. What's missing then is granularity and a way to coerce the vast majority of sites to adopt whatever gets standardized.

Given the current browser duopoly coercing adoption should prove relatively straightforward. So we just need an RFC document and then to somehow gain public support for it.

  • SoftTalker  8 hours ago

    Simple, sites without a rating are not viewable if parental controls are enabled. That will be motivation for site publishers to get their ratings in order.

    • fc417fc802  8 hours ago

      No, the browsers would need to reject the sites unconditionally since no one is going to enable parental controls if it breaks everything. Otherwise I expect the current situation of parental controls not working and thus everyone avoiding them and complaining would continue.

      Recall that this is exactly what happened with TLS. When browsers started gating all new features behind TLS being active suddenly all the mainstream sites had it working across the board in record time.

      The first step is to get Google and Apple to set a date after which adoption is mandated. Provide an easy out for site operators, such as placing a text file at "/.well-known/content-rating" with "tag:all ages" inside to opt the entire site out rather than sending a header per resource or tagging html elements or whatever.

      The second step is to approach legislators with this standard and a now very high compliance rate in hand and suggest that they enact a law requiring that such ratings are accurate for certain specific categories (presumably porn, gambling, social media, and user generated content).

      The third step is getting governments to do spot enforcement often enough to prevent the system from falling apart.

      4 replies →