Microsoft has signed a licensing agreement with ICRA, the Internet Content Rating Association, enabling the Redmond, Washington-based software company to utilize the ICRA system in a range of products such as Internet Explorer, Windows, and FrontPage. The partnership is intended to help better equip parents to create a safer computing environment for children.
Microsoft has also made a financial contribution to the international nonprofit organization ICRA to help support the development of ICRA’s labeling system, designed for digital media providers to describe their content using machine-understandable labels. This allows users to customize their online experience by using a filter to set each user’s personal preferences.
In addition to free web filters, ICRA labels can also be read by other filtering tools, Internet browsers and search engines. The labeling system allows content to be identified by type-i.e., medical, pornographic, or gambling.
“This agreement with Microsoft represents a landmark for ICRA, as it
potentially enables our new labeling system to be made available via extremely high profile distribution channels on a global scale,” said ICRA CEO Stephen Balkam.
“With the help of Microsoft and our other members, ICRA will continue to develop online technologies that can deliver an ever more comprehensive child protection effort, along with a significantly improved means of self regulation to the digital media creation and distribution industries.”
The company says it is shifting to RDF to enable online resource tools, such as search engines, to use the system to filter content based on user preferences, effectively directing people to the material they want without worrying about stumbling across non-family-oriented websites.
ICRA, with offices in the US and UK, includes members like AOL Europe, Bell Canada, BT Openworld, Cable & Wireless, the GSM Association, IA Japan, MadeSafe, Microsoft, PAGi, T-Online and Verizon.
Over 100,000 websites worldwide have already self-labeled, including such brand names as Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, T-Online and Hustler, representing millions of web pages. The ICRA system has been translated into six languages — French, German, Spanish, Italian and simplified and traditional Chinese.
