"Just as most issues are seldom black or white, so are most good solutions seldom black or white. Beware of the solution that requires one side to be totally the loser and the other side to be totally the winner. The reason there are two sides to begin with usually is because neither side has all the facts. Therefore, when the wise mediator effects a compromise, he is not acting from political motivation. Rather, he is acting from a deep sense of respect for the whole truth."

-- Stephen R. Schwambach

All is not what it seems: you might want to read this first.

Since the Internet Industry has embraced PICS with open arms, I thought it'd be kinda nice if they actually knew what it was.

Last month, I attended a meeting of the South Australian Internet Association's Public Education Committee. The aims of the committee include correcting some of the disinformation about the Internet in the minds of the public in general, and our media and politicians in particular.

One discussion I had at the meeting, however, got me thinking about the Industry itself. Of the six people at the table, I found that only two of us knew a jot about PICS, despite the fact that we were all heavily involved in the Internet industry, an industry which is promoting PICS to all and sundry as a solution for a perceived (although non-existent, in my opinion) problem.

So, it looks like I have to preach to the choir a bit.

Another conversation I had after the meeting got me thinking about the way our society looks at problems. Or, more particularly, the way that information-age people (like, dare I say it, us) solve problems compared against the way industrial-age people (like, dare I say it, most of the rest of the population) solve problems. I hope I'm not being too snobbish here, but I think there's a genuine difference in the mindsets of the two communities, due in a large part to traditions and culture which have been influenced by a methodical technology-based approach to problem solving. Where some will say, "Something must be done -- This is `something' -- let's do this!" we'll actually examine the problem and try to come up with a solution which lets everyone win.

... And so we get to PICS.

In addition to a high-level description of PICS, this page contains links to Internet resources which discuss certain aspects of the topic in greater detail (as well as a few whimsical ones I've thrown in for good measure). I'd recommend that you make a summary attempt to briefly visit as many of the links as time permits to gain a good understanding of the background surrounding this topic. Some of the links can be digested in 30 seconds, others could keep you occupied for days, but it's possible to gain an overall appreciation of the topic by spending just a few minutes at each one and perhaps bookmarking the more interesting ones for further attention later on.

The page can probably serve as a PICS primer for just about anybody, although you'll notice that it has been written from a fairly libertarian point of view (so sue me).

PICS shouldn't be seen as the be-all-and-end-all: For an alternative picture of "protecting the children" which deserves a hearty round of applause, tune in here. Jon Katz argues that rather than censoring children, we should be recognizing that they are the only minority group remaining in our society which is forced to live under the total control of another group. Throughout the last thirty years, we've seen all kinds of injustice against all kinds of minority groups exposed, and, in many cases, obliterated -- But Kids? Nope.

Read on. Be educated.

The Platform for Internet Content Selection, or PICS for short, is a technological innovation which allows any special interest group to voice its rage against the decline of moral values in the modern age by censoring anything it determines is abhorrent in our society. PICS acts as a powerful tool to protect our children from the filth and sleaze that is becoming rampant on the Internet.

Err... No. Let's try again.

The Platform for Internet Content Selection, or PICS for short, is a technological innovation which allows able-minded consenting adults to have unfettered access to whatever Internet-based resources they decide to access. As such, PICS stands tall as a means by which civil liberties can reign supreme over the net, and bigoted censorious religious zealots can finally be vanquished.

No, that isn't it either. Hmm.

Explaining PICS to a newbie is like nailing jelly to a tree. The problem is that we're all so used to applying industrial-age style thinking to problems that we have to apply unnatural effort to realize that there is more than one way to skin a cat.

To illustrate what I mean, consider the voluntary euthanasia debate which presently has Australia enraged. For those who have had their heads sealed in diving bells for the last month, a resident of the Northern Territory decided that the pain and suffering caused by his inoperable and terminal cancer was too much to bear, so, by invoking rights conveyed to him by a new Territorian law, he'd enlist the services of a doctor to have himself killed.

Regardless of the ethics, morals or legalities of the end result, the debate which followed this poor gentleman's actions is a wonderful example of "deception by polarization." You see, immediately after the man's death, the Catholic Church released a horribly insensitive statement in condemnation of the Northern Territory's law, in which it said that every act of euthanasia could only be considered as murder or suicide.

This immediately turned the whole affair into a religious war: The right-to-life and religious camps waged horrible bloody battles against the terminally ill and civil libertarian camps, with each side using the front pages of the nation's newspapers as virtual catapults with which to throw taunts and cat-calls at each other -- Meanwhile, with such a ready-made vehicle for publicity, our politicians have jumped on the bandwagon with the grim determination to make a complete hash-job of the whole affair.

This saga makes me glad I don't have cancer :-)

By now, you're probably wondering what the hell this has to do with PICS. You may recall that I started this diversion into the wondrous marvels of our media system to provide an example of the mess that can be made of complicated matters by applying overly simplistic industrial-age black-and-white thinking to them. You see, the only reason the euthanasia topic is so emotional is because, by dint of the tremendously crass statements they released, religious groups polarized the nation: The debate wasn't about the private decision of a man who had suffered incredible depravity for years and wished to suffer no more, it was about "doctors murdering patients." (I won't bother to explore the irrationality of religious groups' attitude towards suicide here).

The same thing has happened on the Internet. The issue of censorship on the net is tremendously complicated, and the points of view put forward by both sides have certain elements of truth. Unfortunately, however, our industrial-age approach for problem solving says we can't have our cake and eat it too: One side says we can either have a happy life or put up with a world that is overrun by paedophiles and pornographers all wanting to rape our children, and the other side says we can either have a happy life or live under a spanish-inquisition-style dictatorship where everything we hear, see and read must first be vetted by George Orwell's "Ministry of Information." The all-consuming nature of this debate has caused untold damage to the 'net as a medium, almost as if it's infected with its own special type of cancer -- Might we say it has been euthanased in Singapore?

You see, as we leave the Industrial-age and enter the Information-age, we are learning new approaches to problem solving. One of the benefits of these advances is that we can stop being so damned two-dimensional in the way we look at the world: We can recognize that some situations are so complicated that treating them as pure black and pure white issues is the same as saying that we'll have pure winners and pure losers, even though there's no reason why everyone can't be declared winners.

And that's where PICS comes in: PICS is designed to make everyone winners.

Elements of the fundamental religious right want to ban "indecency," information about abortion, information about contraception, information about AIDS and other STDs, information about homosexuality, information about political views they see as abhorrent, and a long and continually growing list of other items. So, let's let 'em.

Under the influence of the mainstream tabloid media, which seems to go totally insane whenever the Internet is mentioned, parents want to keep their children away from hard-core pornography, information about how to make bombs, drugs, and sex. So, let them ban that stuff too.

Followers of Islam might like to get rid of references to alcohol on the net, among other things, so let's let them implement their blacklist, shall we?

The governments of the world have been vascillating uselessly for years about "what-to-do-about-all-those-bad-influences-on-the-Internet," and they probably have a long list of things which need to be banned which have been sent in by "Concerned of Surrey Downs," who doesn't actually own a computer but who does read the front page of the Adelaide Advertiser from time to time. Hell, let's let them ban whatever they like too.

Oh dear. Won't this mean that the Internet will be empty? After all, the Christians (to pick one example of many) have no greater right to ban things than anyone else does, so if we let them do it won't we have to let everyone else ban everything else? Won't there be nothing left?

Thankfully, PICS looks after those who object to censorship too: In any free society, citizens have the right to complain about absolutely any aspect of that society, including the aspect that is censorship. You see, PICS is voluntary.

Firstly, publishers of, uh, "sensitive," information on the 'net may wish to tag their wares with a PICS "label." PICS doesn't define what the labels are, but it suggests there should be some standard arrived at by consensus to describe certain materials. For example, there might be a standard label which says, "This page contains pictures of naked women," which could be attached to pornographic URLs, another which says, "This page contains fluffy cuddly bunnies," which could be attached to URLs intended for consumption by children. The presence of a label doesn't immediately indicate that a URL is "objectionable." The label acts as a kind of description of the URL's content.

Secondly, (and this is the good bit), those who wish to censor, shred, burn and ban, or those who wish to promote, enrich, support and publicize, run software on an Internet-connected computer called a PICS "label bureau." Ratings bureaux exist because those who devised PICS recognize that not everyone is going to label their pages: There will be some pages for children, for example, which don't carry the fluffy bunny label. The purpose of the label bureau is to attach labels to URLs.

Here's how it works. You have the latest version of a WWW browser, such as Netscape. You click on a link. You don't have the faintest idea of what's on the other end of that link, and normally that would make you nervous because you're kinda faint-at-heart and easily offended. However, in this case you're not worried at all because your browser is PICS compliant and you're using a PICS bureau.

Before your browser fetches the data from the URL you clicked on, it submits the URL to the label bureau you've chosen to use. The label bureau, upon reception of the URL, consults its URL database to see if the individual or organization who administers this label bureau has attached a label to the URL. If so, that label is returned to your web browser; if not, a default label could be chosen, or no label could be returned at all.

Based on the characteristics of the label returned by the label bureau, your browser decides whether to fetch the page you've asked for. If you've configured your browser to block fluffy bunnies (you might find them offensive; I know I do!) and the label bureau has returned a label which indicates that the URL you're about to get has fluffy bunnies in it, your browser will display an error message instead of the requested page.

If the results returned by the label bureau don't cause your browser to block transfer of the URL you selected, then the URL will be fetched. Before it is displayed on your screen, however, a further check is carried out to see if the content thus fetched contains any labels (you never know, the page's writers may have tagged it with a fluffy bunny label even though your label bureau hasn't caught up with it yet). Once again, if the page's labels say the page is objectionable then it won't be displayed to you.

As previously mentioned, label bureaux don't have to just ban things either: They could also be used to specifically draw your attention to material tagged with labels you think describe your special interests.

How does this guarantee that everyone wins? How does this blow away industrial-age two-dimensional thinking? I'm glad you asked!

You see, there can be more than one label bureau. Anyone can run one. The fundamentalist christians can run a label bureau which returns labels to ban home pages they want to ban; the Catholics can also run bureaux which ban their subset of objectionable pages; the Government could run a PICS bureau (and thereby quite rightly claim that, for the first time ever, it has done something decisive about the threat of child porn on the web, while at the same time claiming that it's upholding the rights to free speech that we should all enjoy in a democratic society); the god-damned boy scouts could run a label bureau for all I care. Each label bureau can ban or approve whatever material its administrators wish.

As a consumer of information, you can configure your web browser to make use of a PICS bureau which is run by an individual or organization who follows the same political, religious or personal value system that you choose for yourself. So if you're a Catholic and don't want to see information about contraception (or, for that matter, voluntary euthanasia), then you can point your browser at the Catholic Church's PICS bureau and feel confident that you'll never see such evils ever again. Meanwhile, those of us who don't want to erect walls around our lives to protect us from reality won't be hurt by your decision (that was a cynical comment now, wasn't it? :-)

Everyone wins: Those who want to be good, upstanding members of society as defined by the political right wing can point their browsers at all manner of restrictive label bureaux and they'll never see a naked nipple on the web again. Those who want to be good, upstanding members of society as defined by the political left wing can point their browsers at, say, EFF's PICS bureau, or no PICS bureau at all, and be confident that if they ever want to see a naked nipple, no bible-bashing religious zealot is going to threaten to throw them in prison for the privilege.

I'm glad you asked.

PICS provides a way for all the blow-hard special-interest groups to put their money where their mouth is. The fundamentalist right-wing is famous for saying, "We don't want to step on anyone's rights, BUT..." Technology has now given us a way to find out just how honest that statement is -- Now that they can do something tangible to shape the world the way they want it without stepping on the rights of those who have a different vision of the future, PICS becomes a political leveller. If Sen. Exon's mob starts a PICS bureau today and then brings forth CDA Mk.II tomorrow, the world will see his lie. If he or his followers don't start PICS bureaux, then the world will see that lie too: They have an opportunity to do something -- Let's see if they will.

PICS is a truly democratic solution to the censorship problem. Its creators have been very careful to avoid talking about censorship at all, because they don't want to be seen to politicize it; they'd rather leave it to advocates like me :-) They have quite deliberately made PICS ethically- neutral by specifying it as a labelling technology without saying what the labels should contain or how they should be used, and as such the technology is left free to appeal to everyone.

Think about that: If PICS' creators had designed it as censorship technology, would it receive a good reception from civil libertarians? If they had designed it as technology to break-down censorship, would it have received a good reception from the right wing, or from politicians in general? So, they didn't take either of those options: They've given us a labelling technology and told us we can do whatever we like with the labels.

Nevertheless, PICS naturally promotes the libertarian view by putting up absolutely no obstacles to publishing. Everyone can publish whatever they like (provided it falls with the law of the land); whether it gets read or not depends on whether people want to read it, and not on whether or not some special interest group says they're allowed to publish it.

PICS is also politically attractive. Politicians can be seen to publicly do something about the imagined rash of obscenity on the net by running or advocating PICS bureaux and publishing all kinds of effusive press releases about their newfound decisiveness (perhaps the ABA in Australia could run one?). What's more, the technology's very design makes it impossible for a government to force its citizens to use a government-regulated PICS bureau as a censorship measure, because there's nothing to stop Internet users from choosing whatever PICS label bureau they want.

PICS recognizes that the world isn't an amorphous blob of middle-class white anglo-saxon conservative males with middle-class white anglo-saxon conservative views of the world; Rather, there is incredible variation even among individual members of special interest groups. For example, some parents will no doubt want to shield their children from the horrors of AIDS, while other parents will wish to see their children gain a working knowledge of the threats and defenses surrounding the issue as soon as they are able to understand them. PICS allows both groups of parents to make a proactive decision about what their children will see by allowing them to choose their own label bureau, or enter ratings information into their own computer if they can't find a label bureau which precisely matches their value system.

[ arguments which attempt to shout down PICS by pointing out that no parent can configure their computer in a way which can't be de-configured by their teenage child in thirty seconds are irrelevent here: By applying exactly the same principle to legislative censorship regimes we see that exactly the same result would ensue there too. However, the legislative model infringes upon the freedoms of every internet user in this country to achieve this rather doubtful exercise in uselessness, whereas the PICS model doesn't infringe on anything at all.

The facts of the matter remain: PICS is enabling technology which can assist a parent in their supervision of their child. However, neither PICS nor censorship can or will replace that supervision -- Unless we decide that the only valid way to protect growing, curious teenagers from the intellectual, emotional and ethical rigours of the real world is to lock them up in small steel boxes until they're 18, supervision will always be needed, and will always be irresponsible for a parent to refuse or neglect to give it. ]

That's assuming they care at all, of course. I get the impression that most parents seem to care enough to bitch and moan about the "problem," but not enough to actually do something about it. But maybe that's just me being parenthetically cynical again. On the other hand, maybe that's a very large contributor to the problem at hand. (or maybe I'm being too two-dimensional about this :-)

Censorship is a centralized "solution" to a distributed "problem" -- No single country can regulate the entire Internet, so any efforts at censorship are doomed to abject uselessness at best, or abuse of civil rights at worst. Centralized solutions simply do not work on the Internet, which, from its architecture up, is distributed. Netizens are frequently flabbergasted at the actions of politicians who believe that their censorship regimes have even the slightest chance of interfacing cleanly to the Internet paradigm; Thinking about the 'net in the same way that people think about other media seems to be one of the largest causes for misunderstanding about the net.

PICS, on the other hand, is a distributed solution to the distributed problem: It recognizes that people with different value systems won't all want to subscribe to the same value system enforcement regime, and as such it permits a wide diversity of views and tolerances -- Unlike the centralized solution which only permits a single view and even fails at that. It puts "control of the Internet" in the hands of the consumer, rather than attempting a heavy-handed totalitarian legislative regulatory regime over the provider (read: speaker).

Finally, PICS is one of the first mass-market examples of information-age problem solving. PICS elevates the censorship debate from "paedophiles vs facists" to a question of "what would you, as a human being, prefer you and your children to see?" (deem relevant "where do you want to go today?" puns included)

In a democracy, I can't think of anything more appropriate.