# Self-censorship using URLs

Leslie Daigle (leslie@bunyip.com)
Tue, 5 Sep 1995 10:29:01 -0400

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    From: Leslie Daigle <leslie@bunyip.com>

    Date: Tue, 5 Sep 1995 10:29:01 -0400

    Message-Id: <199509051429.KAA05136@beethoven.bunyip.com>

    To: uri@bunyip.com

    Subject: Self-censorship using URLs

The real shortcoming of building any kind of "censorship/rating tags"
into a document or a URL is the fact that it can only support a single rating
scheme across many cultures in a given country, and many more across
the _world_.

For example, resources about Darwinian evolution are going to be unacceptable
to Flat-Earth Society members, but are probably considered "Educational",
and/or "General" to the majority of the earth's population.

Or, how do you define "acceptable amounts of flesh" displayed in a picture
or video? In Canadian television, there are already examples of having
to change content of a single television program (that was made for
both English and French Canadian audiences) because the English population
considered the French version too racy. And what about other cultures
that consider North-American women's dress as being far too revealing?

The only thing that can be accomplished in building tags into a document
or a URL is ratings for a particular population's perception of the
information space. Any rating system that purports to deal with rating
in a general sense will have to allow different populations to rate
the same document using different criteria and tags. The Internet-Draft
draft-ietf-uri-urc-req-01.txt provides one proposal of a service that could
accommodate this kind of rating system, and I'm sure there are others.

Cheers!
Leslie.

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"I'm not napping, Leslie Daigle
I'm redecorating my personal space." leslie@bunyip.com
-- ThinkingCat Montreal, Canada
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