Will Labelling Protect Children from Harmful Material?
The most commonly given reason for labelling material on the Internet is to empower parents and others to protect children from accessing potentially harmful material. There seems to be a widely held belief that material unsuitable for children needs to be labelled so that parents can ensure children cannot gain access it. That is in fact false. Labelling of such material is not an effective means of protecting children. It is also counter-productive because PICS labelling systems work the other way around. Software filtering programs (eg. PICS compatible web browsers) use labels to decide whether or not to allow access to a document. However, these programs also allow access to unlabelled material (and material labelled by systems not recognised by the program) unless the user has set the software to block all unlabelled material. Thus, unless every document originating in every country is labelled with the same rating system (which is not foreseeable), the software must be set to blo
