Comment by mindslight
8 hours ago
> But the entire point here is that there would be a legal mandate for all sites to carry such tags.
My point is that you don't even need to mandate it for all sites, and attempting to do is kind of specious based on the existence of foreign sites. Rather you can focus on mandating it for the large consumer-oriented sites, and this will create enough of a critical mass that a web browser with parental controls enabled will have decent functionality.
The difficulty with forcing some uniform mandate onto "all sites" is that the mandate has to be for tags that are faithfully stated, rather than a blanket 18+. And small personal website operators shouldn't be in the position of being forced to determine whether the random stuff on their personal website is specifically suitable for 13+, 18+, etc.
That's the goal of defining the semantics in terms of an open system rather than a closed system - it fails gracefully.
> None of the current options are particularly good even if you are a parent that cares and is willing to invest time and effort.
Pragmatically this is disappointing to hear, but matches everything I've been able to surmise.
> The idea isn't for the site to communicate some arbitrary age appropriateness signal that they as a third party to the family couldn't possibly know. Rather it's to communicate classes of content such as porn, gambling, violence, social media, user generated content, games, that sort of thing.
I think it should be both. There should be a class of tags that assert a site is legally fine for a 13 year old to view in the US, an 8 year old to view in the US, etc, possibly multiplied with jurisdiction. (note the direction there - it's not a statement that there is content unsuitable for a 13 year old, rather it's a warranty that the contents are suitable for a 13 year old). There should also be tags of the content/aim of the site like you've listed.
The settings in the parental control software can then make a good first pass based on age, then content categories, then parents could even allow/disallow specific sites. The point is to provide good defaults, but ultimately keep control of parents rather than giving it away to corporate attorneys as any age verification (ie identity verification) based solution inherently does.
> small personal website operators shouldn't be in the position of being forced to determine whether the random stuff on their personal website is specifically suitable for 13+, 18+, etc.
Agreed, but I take that a step farther and apply it to all operators. It's one thing to have a tag "18+ in the US" for when an operator is reasonably certain that his content is not legal to provide to minors. But the vast majority of the time operators should not be expected to be legal experts and they certainly can't be expected to keep up with all the different jurisdictions of the world.
Keep in mind the motivating issue here is parents filtering the content that their children are routinely exposed to. Everyone will inevitably have different concerns and standards, ex no social media versus no user generated content whatsoever versus 1 hour of social media or games or whatever per day. It's content awareness that's missing here. Everyone with legal concerns already posts a disclaimer that you have to click through and if they really care they send the RTA header.
> attempting to do is kind of specious based on the existence of foreign sites.
If the major browser vendors require it to load a page at all then it immediately becomes a de facto global requirement.
> The difficulty with forcing some uniform mandate onto "all sites" is that the mandate has to be for tags that are faithfully stated
One of the tags would amount to "not applicable". If a bunch of small time operators would prefer to be blocked by default and not think about the content they post then they could coordinate to create their own tag for that. The first step is uniform adoption then after that governments can penalize noncompliance in the form of inaccurate tags. I don't expect the latter would be much of an issue in practice though. Most people aren't going to intentionally misconfigure something but lazily not bothering in the first place is all too common.