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.

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SoftTalker 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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fc417fc802 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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SoftTalker 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sounds good to me. Why didn't Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and the porn industry do this 15 years ago? Why did they pretend to have no responsibility for the content they were publishing? Why did they think clicking "Yes" on an "I am 18 years of age" popup was sufficient?

	▲	EmbarrassedHelp 21 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Why did they think clicking "Yes" on an "I am 18 years of age" popup was sufficient? Because that is the only acceptable solution and it doesn't violate user privacy. Other than off-by-default parental controls that are optionally enabled.
	▲	fc417fc802 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		TBF porn is the only thing I can recall people really getting up in arms about previously and the major sites for that have been sending the RTA header since forever. Otherwise I think the "I am 18 years of age" fig leaf was just a nod to the law in a world where none of the legislatures had bothered to formalize compliance requirements. Really the internet of 20 let alone 30 years ago was just such a different place. I don't recall any gacha games (let alone targeted at children) or opaque recommendation algorithms that would push extremist content. Keep in mind that for a long time online retailers in the US weren't even collecting sales tax properly and then for a while there was disagreement about which state the sales tax should go to. It seems like a computer and the network enter the mix and suddenly the IQ of everyone involved mysteriously drops to room temperature. My impression is that the latest push involves parents wanting to do "something" but not being sure what that "something" ought to be. The legislators in turn are either in league with lobbyists who have a vested interest in online ID for one reason or another or alternatively they merely feel similarly to the parents that "something" ought to be done but they don't really have any good options. It's unfortunate but I don't think it's realistic to expect legislators to go out and have a usable web standard drawn up when one doesn't already exist.