People talk about how PICS empowers the user. But PICS is two-sided: It supports self-labeling and "third-party rating." On one side, people can rate their own documents using whatever rating system they want. On the other side, rating authorities can also rate other people's content -- just as Web censorware now works -- and distribute their ratings online. Or, if they have the power or the legal authority, they can just cut off access to sites they don't like. This is not content identification, it's content control. "We're complacent about the nature of the Net," Lessig says. "We think it's unregulatable and that it can be no other way. Well, PICS changes the architecture of the Internet into an extremely regulatable structure. You then have a versatile and robust censorship tool, not just for parents but for censors everywhere. It will allow China and Singapore to clean up the Net. It will let companies control what their employees can see. It makes it easy for school administrators to prevent students from viewing controversial sites." This is no exercise in academic conjecture. Already, Australia, Japan and Dubai are weighing labeling plans to muzzle the Net. And censorware programs are already in use in some public library systems and public school systems. Soon, third-party intermediaries -- from employers, libraries, universities and access providers to the Internet cafe down the street -- may substitute their judgment for yours. And that's the most subversive part of this: You may never know that a particular article or idea or site even existed. Indeed, censorware products are already blocking access to political organizations, medical information and unpopular viewpoints. And chances are that it won't end there. Legislation, boycotts and pressure tactics may be brought to bear against Internet service providers that refuse to block sites featuring alternative lifestyles, extremist political views or fringe ideas. We already have a recent precedent. Remember those "advisory" labels on music CDs? Andy Oram, moderator of the Cyber-rights mailing list for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility -- which opposes Internet ratings -- says, "Music labels were supposed to be advisory, but we've already seen albums excluded from stores, and several states passed laws barring teenagers from buying albums with advisory stickers. What started out as a tool for parental empowerment turned into an effective means of censorship." Already, several Net rating bills have been floated in Congress, ranging from government-mandated labels to criminal penalties for those who mislabel their site. One proposal, the Online Cooperative Publishing Act, was put forward by SafeSurf to ensure that families "may feel secure in their homes from unwanted material." SafeSurf, which is lobbying mightily to become the rating system for Netscape, goes well beyond RSAC's sex, nudity, violence and language categories and five levels of access. Instead, it offers nine categories -- including gambling, "glorifying drug use" and "homosexual themes" -- and nine rating levels. (It also screens for "intolerance of another's race, religion or gender.") The company, which started out in 1995 as a two-person parents' group, just moved into plush offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, backed by large investors. "A lot of parents we hear from are more concerned with gangs and gambling and neo-Nazis than with Playboy," says company president Wendy Simpson, who claims SafeSurf has members in every nation on the planet. Simpson notes, correctly, that PICS filtering is value-neutral -- and indeed one can imagine many uses beyond screening for "adult" content. She says the Simon Wiesenthal Center has contacted SafeSurf about devising a rating system to screen out Nazi hate groups and sites that glorify the Holocaust. In short, Simpson doesn't think there are any free-speech issues involved at all. "The day is going to come when it'll just seem to be the natural thing to do, to rate your own site. To tell you the truth -- and I told President Clinton this -- I don't think there is resistance [to Internet ratings]. I think there's a lack of public awareness." Stephen Balkam, executive director of RSAC, also dismisses free-speech concerns and the prospect of censorship by repressive regimes: "It's unfortunate that the Chinese have moved in a different direction from the rest of the world. But you can hardly blame technology for what these governments decide to do. It's like saying electricity is to blame for electrocutions." For its part, Netscape is even more sanguine about the implications for global censorship. Peter Harter, the company's global public policy counsel, says Netscape is "value neutral" on the subject of censorship. "Netscape has responsibilities as a global information company," he says. "Other countries don't have a First Amendment, and we don't believe it's our right to force our values down the throats of other cultures and countries. If Singapore or China or other nondemocratic countries choose to set up massive filters to restrict the information flowing into their country, it's their right." Why not make the issue moot by developing a technology that can be used only at the desktop user level? Says Balkam: "That ignores what goes on in the workplace. I can see the value of a company setting a Level 2 for nudity as a way to prevent employees from spending two hours a day looking at porn sites." It seems that snuffing out political dissent on the Net is just the price the developing world will have to pay in order for businesses to crack down on employees peeking at nude pictures. As if all this weren't controversy enough, RSAC is about to wade into the uncharted territory of determining which publications qualify as "news" sites on the Internet. The board has already approved an "RSACnews" rating that would exempt news organizations from having to rate their own Web pages. Users could then click on a separate lever in their browser to decide if they want to receive news or not. Microsoft has given preliminary acceptance of the news category for Internet Explorer 4.0, Balkam says. Such an exemption is RSAC's tacit admission that ratings are unworkable for such things as news coverage. How, after all, do you rate a story about the murder of Gianni Versace, or Bosnia war victims, or the Oklahoma City bombing? And how do you decide where news itself begins and ends? RSAC and an adjunct advisory board, the Internet Content Coalition -- made up of representatives from the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, Sony, Prodigy, Playboy, Ziff-Davis, Ad Week, CNET and Wired, among others -- intend to judge which news sites qualify as "legitimate," based on criteria now being drafted. Thus, mainstream news organizations will sit in judgment of small, alternative, activist publications. Will sites specializing in soft news, analysis or features qualify for the news rating -- sites like Slate, Suck or Salon? Balkam thinks not: "We'll follow a similar line to television ratings, where soft news items are rated." As ratings systems are installed across the Web, the most important question to ask at each step of the way will be, whose hands are on the controls? Paul Resnick, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information who helped devise the PICS standard, sees a future in which control is widely distributed among hundreds of different rating systems: "We'll be able to share one Internet but see the network, and each other, through our own lenses." But are they lenses -- or blinders? It doesn't take a wild leap of the imagination to see where all this is leading. Islamic countries will block out Western values on the Net. Iraq and Iran will censor their dissidents. Israel will ban sites sympathetic to the Palestinians. Virtual reality pioneer Lanier, who considers PICS more dangerous than the CDA, cautions: "The Internet creates a giant mirror where we see the whole of humanity -- the bad with the good. If you start creating these narrow rating channels by precensoring opinions and ideas before you've even been exposed to them, then our lives will be dimmed and narrower and the sky a little less bright." In the ferocious stampede to protect children in cyberspace, many people who should know better are willing to balkanize and fragment the Internet. If we succumb to the hype of ratings and labeling, our new lenses will show us only a flattened, one-dimensional view of the online world. Mass-audience corporate Web sites will be spared, but ratings will blind us to many of the quirky, idiosyncratic, vibrant voices that make the Internet so astonishing. And to what end? Warns Sobel, the EPIC counsel: "This kind of technology will sanitize content to the point that it's even safer and less controversial than the mainstream media." That should scare us infinitely more than what's out there on the Net today. July 31, 1997 Joseph D. Lasica is the new media columnist for the American Journalism Review. He's looking for an agent for his just-completed suspense novel about DNA grave-robbing. Are Web ratings going to help parents and kids feel comfortable online? Or will they just reduce the free flow of information on the Net? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture area and speak out.