What concerns are raised by third-party ratings?
Since third-party ratings aren’t validated by any technical means, third-party ratings can be easily misused. Just as stand-alone filtering software can block sites for political or business reasons (even if those sites do not contain adult content), third party raters might apply inaccurate labels to web sites in order to make sure that they would be blocked by PICS-compliant software. To make matters worse, third party rating does not require the consent or even notification of a web-site publisher. Since third party ratings are distributed by third party “label bureaus,” a web-site publisher may not know if her pages have been rated, or what the ratings said. Third-party ratings also present significant technical challenges that may discourage their development. Unlike self-ratings, third party PICS ratings do not reside on publisher’s web pages. Instead, they must be distributed to users using one of two methods: • File Transfer: Users could download ratings from the web sites prov
